Scott Aaronson

You can read some of her efforts in her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China (one of the Asia Society’s top 5 China books of 2014).

Yes, I’m well-aware that 60 Minutes recently ran a segment on quantum computing, featuring the often-in-error-but-never-in-doubt Michio Kaku.

- Oded Regev put an exciting paper on the arXiv, showing how to factor an n-digit integer using quantum circuits of size ~O(n3/2) (multiple such circuits, whose results are combined classically), assuming a smoothness conjecture from number theory.

- A team from IBM, consisting of Sergey Bravyi, Andrew Cross, Jay Gambetta, Dmitri Maslov, Ted Yoder, and my former student Patrick Rall, put another exciting paper on the arXiv, which reports an apparent breakthrough in quantum error-correction—building a quantum memory based on LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) codes rather than the Kitaev surface code, and which (they say) with an 0.1% physical error rate, can preserve 12 logical qubits for ten million syndrome cycles using 288 physical qubits, rather than more than 4000 physical qubits with the surface code.

Briefly, I think that this is one of the most important books so far of the twenty-first century.