Peter Shor

Contact information

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 at 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

Here is a quantum computing limerick I wrote (and Volker Strassen's reply to it).
And here is my reply to the famous self-referential limerick about the guy from Japan.

I've also posted some less frivolous poetry:
Here are three poems I wrote about books by George R.R. Martin.
Here is An Agnostic Physicist Muses Upon the Dawn, an original poem.
Here is Landscape with Redwoods, Snake, and California Poppies, an original poem.
And here is a nonsense-style poem inspired by a book by another of my favorite authors, the late Gene Wolfe.

Here is my translation of Alphonse de Lamartine's poem L'isolement.
Here is my translation of Heinrich Heine's poem Die Lorelei.
Here is my translation of Charles Baudelaire's poem Le Gouffre.

And 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.

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 MIT's Stellar course management system. My older courses are archived here.