Benjamin "Ben" Schumacher is an American
theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of
quantum information theory
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both t ...
.
He discovered a way of interpreting
quantum
In physics, a quantum (plural quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantizati ...
states as
information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as
Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of
Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as
quantum information theory
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both t ...
.
Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term
qubit along with
William Wootters
William "Bill" Kent Wootters () is an American theoretical physicist, and one of the founders of the field of quantum information theory. In a 1982 joint paper with Wojciech H. Zurek, Wootters proved the no cloning theorem, at the same time as D ...
of
Williams College, which is to
quantum computation
Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...
as a
bit
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented ...
is to traditional computation.
He is the author of ''Physics in Spacetime'',
a textbook on
Special Relativity, and ''Quantum Processes, Systems, and Information'' (with Michael Westmoreland), a textbook on
Quantum Mechanics. Schumacher is a professor of physics at
Kenyon College
Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio. It was founded in 1824 by Philander Chase. Kenyon College is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
Kenyon has 1,708 undergraduates enrolled. Its 1,000-acre campus is s ...
, a liberal arts college in rural Ohio. He is the lecturer in four courses produced by the
Teaching Company: ''Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime: Understanding Gravity; Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World; Impossible: Physics Beyond the Edge;'' and ''The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes''.
Schumacher earned his bachelor's degree at
Hendrix College, where he met his wife, mathematician
Carol Schumacher.
His Ph.D. is from the
University of Texas at Austin, where his advisers were Richard Matzner and
John Archibald Wheeler.
Influential research papers
*
See also
*
Classical capacity
In quantum information theory, the classical capacity of a quantum channel is the maximum rate at which classical data can be sent over it error-free in the limit of many uses of the channel. Holevo, Schumacher, and Westmoreland proved the followi ...
References
External links
Zeroth Order Approximation- Blog by Benjamin Schumacher
The Physics of Impossible Things
Speaker: Ben Schumacher, 03/12/2008, PIRSA - Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schumacher, Benjamin
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
21st-century American physicists
Hendrix College alumni
University of Texas at Austin alumni
Kenyon College faculty
Quantum information scientists
Fellows of the American Physical Society