The Name Inside Every Quantum Computer
In short: At the centre of the enormous calculations a quantum computer performs today sits the name of one man. The matrix that quantum chemistry software builds to compute the energy of a molecule is called the Hamiltonian. Yet William Rowan Hamilton, the man who left that name behind, stopped mid-walk on a Dublin canal bridge in 1843, took out a pocket knife, and carved a formula into the stone — and he died more than twenty years later believing he had lost. A boy who learned a language for every year of his life Hamilton was born in Dublin in 1805 and raised by an uncle who was a remarkable linguist. He was reading Hebrew at four; at ten he was reading Euclid in Latin; by thirteen he had taken up more than ten languages. Then, at eight, he tasted a defeat he never forgot: an American calculating prodigy, Zerah Colburn, beat him decisively in a public contest in Dublin. The passion he had poured into languages moved into mathematics instead. At seventeen he found an error in Lap...