Peter Shor

Contact information

Current Course

My Fall 2023 course is 18.424. Here is the Course Info page for last year

Quantum Computation Lecture Notes

Here are my lecture notes from the fall 2022 course on quantum computation, 8.170/18.435.

Office Hours

Please see the websites for my courses.

Publications:

Here is a list of some of my papers that are available for downloading. Not all of them may be other places on the web. These were available electonically at my AT&T website, and I've put some of them up on this website. The newer ones are mainly on the arXiv. If there's one that you want that I don't have up, please email me.
My PhD thesis (scanned in) is here.

Interests:

My mathematical research is currently mainly in quantum computing and quantum information theory, but I am also interested in (and have in the past worked in) algorithms, computational geometry, combinatorics, and probability theory.

Other Stuff

I often get asked what are some good reference material about quantum computation. A good textbook for quantum computation is Nielsen and Chuang. A good textbook for quantum information theory is Mark Wilde. Good course notes on the web are available from John Preskill, which may eventually become a book, and from Umesh Vazirani. I previously had a link to David Mermin's course notes as well, but these don't seem to be on the web anymore. They've been turned into a book.

Poetry

Limericks and some humorous poems

Here is a quantum computing limerick I wrote (and Volker Strassen's reply to it).
Here are some self-referential limericks.
Here is a self-referential Shakespearean sonnet.
Here is a poem rebutting a myth about what makes New York City bagels so good.
And here is a poem about poetic meters (which might be best appreciated by poetry nerds).

More poems

Here is This is no clockwork universe, an original poem.
Here are two poems I wrote for quantum computing skeptics.
Here is The Quantum, that I wrote in celebration of quantum weirdness.
Here is my poem Addicted to Proof, that was published in The Mathematical Intelligencer.
Here is The Sound of Quantum Fluctuations in the Early Universe,
Here is An Agnostic Physicist Muses Upon the Dawn.

Here are three poems I wrote about books by George R.R. Martin.
Here is a nonsense-style poem inspired by a book by another of my favorite authors, the late Gene Wolfe.

Here is Landscape with redwoods, snake, and California poppies, an original poem.

Translations

Here is my translation of Heinrich Heine's poem Die Lorelei.
And here are my translations of Alphonse de Lamartine's wonderful French poems L'isolement and Le lac.
Here is my translation of Charles Baudelaire's poem Le Gouffre.
Here are translations of eight other poems of Baudelaire.

Poetry written by other people

Here is one of my favorite poems, by Conrad Aiken, which is virtually unknown. It's very appropriate for an Easter poem, and I posted it for Easter 2018.
Jacqueline Osherow is a contemporary poet whom I really like. One of my favorite poems of hers is Eclipses of the Moon.
And here is a feminist fantasy poem by Elinor Wylie: Enchanter's Handmaiden, posted (a few days late) for International Women's Day in 2024.

Mathematical Writing

I gave a talk about Minkowski's and Keller's cube tiling conjectures, their motivations, and their eventual proof and disproof, in the IAP Mathematics Lecture Series, on January 26, 2004. The history of these conjectures is quite interesting, as Minkowski's original conjecture was motivated by a question about Diophantine approximations, but on the way to their resolutions, these conjectures mutated into questions about tiling high dimensional spaces with cubes, about finite Abelian groups, and about the structures of certain specific graphs. The lecture notes are here (with some typos fixed 02-08-04). The homework problems are here.

Past Courses:

For my recent courses, I have used the Canvas course management system and MIT's Stellar course management system. My older courses are archived here.