A Deep Dive Into The Mathematics Of Quantum Gates

Understand Quantum gates like a pro by grokking the mathematics behind them.

Photograph of Claude Shannon, called “the father of information theory”, who pioneered the concept of using Boolean logic in electrical circuits, laying the foundation for modern computing. (Source)

You must be familiar with logic gates if you've been programming computers.

George Boole first introduced Boolean logic in the 19th century.

Claude Shannon later introduced the application of Boolean functions to electrical components as part of his master’s thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits.

These logic gates NOT, AND, OR and their combinations are now ubiquitous and used to create all computational circuits in modern-day computers.

Similar to these, Quantum computers are formed using Quantum circuits composed of Quantum gates that manipulate qubits and perform computations.

Given a qubit, Quantum gates can perform the following operations:

• Flipping qubit states
• Creating Superposition
• Introducing phase shifts
• Entangling multiple qubits

To understand them better, we must deeply understand the mathematics behind them.

This lesson is all about that.

Quantum Gates Are Unitary Matrices