Q IS FOR QUANTUM

Terry Rudolph was forced into a basic science degree by cruel parents, who failed to appreciate the merits of him becoming a pro squash player. Choosing physics and math (because they seemed hardest) he attended 6 lectures over three years. One was the final Advanced Quantum Theory lecture, where the lecturer ruined Terry’s intellectual happiness (for the next 20+ years) by presenting a proof of “quantum nonlocality”.

 

After finishing his undergraduate at the university of Queensland in 1994, a year of backpacking found him penniless and sleeping on a street in downtown Toronto, at which point doing a PhD seemed like a reasonable alternative. Fortunately his PhD mother was extremely lax and let him study the nascent field of quantum information. As he was an early adopter, little actual talent was required to become an expert, so upon completion of his PhD in 1998 he moved straight to lecturing the topic for two years at the University of Toronto.

 

This was followed by a postdoc in Vienna  for a year followed by facilitating the collapse of Bell Labs’ basic research group from within for two years, after which he came to Imperial College in 2003 on an Advanced Fellowship. There he continued his intellectual exponential  decay, becoming a professor in 2012. In 2016 he was violently wrenched from this peaceful state of affairs when he took leave from academia and co-founded PsiQuantum, a silicon valley based company that is building a photonic quantum computer.