John Watrous

Biography

Dr. John Watrous is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Research Interest

Present-day computers are classical computing devices: each component of a classical computer has a definite logical state before and after each step of a computation, and computations proceed according to rules dictated by sequences of deterministic (or sometimes randomized) logical operations. According to the theory of quantum information, however, which offers an abstraction of the information-theoretic aspects of quantum mechanical systems, classical computations represent only a limited subset of the computations that can potentially be implemented by physical devices. Professor Watrous's research on the theory of quantum information and computation studies the powers and limitations of this computational paradigm.