Download Preskill’s slides here:QuantHEP-Seminar-2020-10-John-Preskill

John Phillip Preskill (born January 19, 1953) is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also the Director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.

Preskill is a leading scientist in the field of quantum information scienceand quantum computation, and he is known for coining the term “quantum supremacy.”

Preskill received his Ph.D. in the same subject from Harvard University in 1980. His graduate adviser at Harvard was Steven Weinberg.

While still a graduate student, Preskill made a name for himself by publishing a paper on the cosmological production of superheavy magnetic monopoles in Grand Unified Theories. Since we do not observe any magnetic monopoles, this work pointed out serious flaws in the then current cosmological models, a problem which was later addressed by Alan Guth and others by proposing the idea of cosmic inflation.

Since 2000 he has been the Director of the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. In recent years most of his work has been in mathematical issues related to quantum computation and quantum information theory. He is known for coining the term “Quantum Supremacy” in a 2012 paper.[4]

Preskill has achieved some notoriety in the popular press as party to a number of bets involving fellow theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne. Hawking conceded the Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet in 2004 and gave Preskill a copy of Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia.

Preskill was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1991 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.[5][6]