Raymond Laflamme, Canadian pioneer in quantum computing, has died
Raymond Laflamme, a Canadian pioneer in the field of quantum information processing who once worked with Stephen Hawking, has died after a lengthy bout with cancer.
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The University of Waterloo announced his death in a press release this week. He died June 19 on what would have been his 65th birthday.
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Born in Québec City, the third of five siblings, Laflamme studied physics as an undergraduate at the Université Laval before moving to England to continue his education there.
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At Cambridge University, he earned his PhD under the supervision of Stephen Hawking, at one point convincing the eminent scientist (over the course of six months' spirited discussion) that Hawking was wrong in his belief that time would run backwards during the contraction of the universe.
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Hawking gave credit to Laflamme for this contribution in his best-selling book A Brief History of Time. When Laflamme left Cambridge a few years later, Hawking personalized his copy of the book with a note reading: 'To Raymond, who showed me that the arrow of time is not a boomerang. Thank you for all your help. Stephen.'
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After Cambridge, Laflamme worked for a number of years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where his interests shifted from cosmology to quantum computing.
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In 2001, he returned to Canada and joined the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo and the university's newly created Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. There, he became founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, a position he held for 15 years.
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'Through his leadership, IQC became a world-class research hub, positioning Canada at the forefront of the quantum revolution,' the university said in its release. 'In his scientific research, Laflamme pioneered theoretical and experimental approaches to quantum information processing and quantum error correction.'
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It added: 'Laflamme and colleagues developed an innovative approach to quantum information processing using linear optics, the results of which became one of the most referenced works in quantum computing.'
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