The Breakthrough Prize Foundation established the Maryam Mirzakhani prize in 2019 to recognize early-career women in Mathematics. This year the prize was increased from one to three recipients “due to the intense interest generated by the Prize and the extremely high qualify of nominations” see the Breakthrough Prize website.
Urmila Mahadev received the Maryam Mirzakhani prize “Citation: For work that addresses the fundamental question of verifying the output of a quantum computation.” The 2020 recipients also include Nina Holden, ETH Zurich and Lisa Piccirillo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Photo credit: Jana Ašenbrennerová for Quanta Magazine
Read the full Caltech media story During her graduate work at UC Berkeley, Mahadev came up with a solution to a pressing problem of quantum computing: How do you verify that the machine’s answers are indeed correct? The goal of quantum computing is to solve problems that are insurmountable to classical computers, such as computing the properties of complex molecules. But if classical computers cannot solve the problems, how can the quantum solutions be verified?
Mahadev solved the puzzle by coming up with a protocol that allows for interactions between classical and quantum computers in such a way that a classical computer can verify a quantum solution. According to an article in Quanta magazine, the protocol enables “users with no quantum powers of their own … to put a harness on a quantum computer and drive it wherever they want, with the certainty that the quantum computer is following their orders.”
Thomas Vidick describes Mahadev’s work as “one of the most outstanding ideas to have emerged at the interface of quantum computing and theoretical computer science in recent years … it is such a wonderful idea! It stuns me every time Urmila explains it.” Read his full discussion in the IQIM Blog post The Quantum Wave in Computing
