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Quantum Computing: From Alice to Bob

If you get the joke in the title, you are not the intended audience for this book. Those who know cryptography (whether quantum or not) have heard of the plight of Alice, who is trying to send a secret message to Bob while Eve is eavesdropping. But this book is written for undergraduate students or even high school students with just a bit of high school algebra and trigonometry knowledge.

The reader gets to avoid the complexity of technical quantum-computing books, yet gets more depth and rigor than in the popular writing on the topic. Instead of struggling with technical jargon, the reader follows an informal dialogue between the real Alice and Bob (the authors of this book) and an imaginary student, Cardy.

Both authors have Ph.D.s (one of them from Harvard), but the book is written in a very conversational rather than academic tone. The math might still look scary at first to a high school student, but it is mainly symbolic sums and some quantum notations, with no calculus, linear algebra or even complex numbers.

For those who want to dig deeper, the book provides ample lists of additional sources, along with career advice and a set of biographies of "who’s who" in quantum computing (role models for the intended audience). “Try it!” exercises help apply the concepts and make the book even more appealing as a textbook for a semester-long course.

A companion website promises many wonderful goodies, including additional problems, solutions and “cool stuff to impress your students,” but at the time of writing this review, it was just a work-in-progress template with mostly missing content or unrelated placeholder files.

Review by Bogdan Hoanca, University of Alaska Anchorage, USA.

The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or its publisher, Optica (formerly OSA).

Publish Date: 15 June 2023

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