In the past decade, quantum computing has become an increasingly hot topic, with hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into dozens of companies trying to build a quantum computer. In this talk, we will learn what quantum computation is mathematically, and what makes it distinct from what ordinary computers do. In particular, we will see why it can speed up (a few, very specific) computations, including an algorithm which would break much of modern cryptography (Shor’s Algorithm).

As the name suggests, this will be somewhat in the style of a “what is…?” talk, with the only prerequisite knowledge being linear algebra.