Book Image

Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing

By : Leonard S. Woody III
5 (1)
Book Image

Essential Mathematics for Quantum Computing

5 (1)
By: Leonard S. Woody III

Overview of this book

Quantum computing is an exciting subject that offers hope to solve the world’s most complex problems at a quicker pace. It is being used quite widely in different spheres of technology, including cybersecurity, finance, and many more, but its concepts, such as superposition, are often misunderstood because engineers may not know the math to understand them. This book will teach the requisite math concepts in an intuitive way and connect them to principles in quantum computing. Starting with the most basic of concepts, 2D vectors that are just line segments in space, you'll move on to tackle matrix multiplication using an instinctive method. Linearity is the major theme throughout the book and since quantum mechanics is a linear theory, you'll see how they go hand in hand. As you advance, you'll understand intrinsically what a vector is and how to transform vectors with matrices and operators. You'll also see how complex numbers make their voices heard and understand the probability behind it all. It’s all here, in writing you can understand. This is not a stuffy math book with definitions, axioms, theorems, and so on. This book meets you where you’re at and guides you to where you need to be for quantum computing. Already know some of this stuff? No problem! The book is componentized, so you can learn just the parts you want. And with tons of exercises and their answers, you'll get all the practice you need.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction
4
Section 2: Elementary Linear Algebra
8
Section 3: Adding Complexity
13
Section 4: Appendices
Appendix 1: Bra–ket Notation
Appendix 2: Sigma Notation
Appendix 5: References

Binary operations

You are probably familiar with some binary operations, for example, addition and multiplication, but we are going to look at binary operations in more depth.

The definition of a binary operation

A binary operation is simply a function that takes two input values and outputs one value. More precisely, it takes an ordered pair (known as an operand) from the Cartesian product of two sets and produces an element in another set. Using our notation:

An operation can be anything! For example, sexual reproduction within the set of mammals can be considered a binary operation. It takes an ordered pair from the subsets of males and females and produces another member of the set of mammals. More formally:

Within the number systems, addition is a good example of a binary operation. Let's define it for the real numbers:

You'll notice that with binary operations, we don't use the usual function notation of f(x, y), but instead, we use...