Alexei Kitaev

Big textAlexei Kitaev is a professor of physics and computer science at the California Institute of Technology. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. For this work, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. He is also known for defining the complexity class QMA, the quantum analog of NP, and showing that some local Hamiltonian problems are QMA-complete .

Kitaev was educated in Russia, receiving an M.Sc from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (1986), and a Ph.D from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (1989). He served previously as a researcher (1999-2001) at Microsoft Research and as a research associate (1989-1998) at the Landau Institute.

References

Kitaev, A. Yu. "Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons." Annals Phys. 303 (2003) 2-30

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/cspeople/faculty/kitaev_a.html

http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.4537269/k.87D4/Alexei_Kitaev.htm