Category: Graphical Reasoning

Our paper inspires equations appearing in hit TV series, Rick and Morty

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Rick tells Morty, “That book has everything they need to create snake time travel” set to a backdrop containing markings reminiscent of odd hieroglyphics on a chalkboard. These markings are actually redrawn from diagrammatic equations appearing in Jacob Biamonte’s book, Quantum Tensor Networks. For reasons described in the book, certain classes of equations admit a formal diagramatic calculus. The equations appearing on the board prove what is known as the “snake equation”. This is fitting since Rick and Morty, Season 4: Episode 5, “Rattlestar Ricklactica” was centred around snakes that invent time travel. When asked about the situation, Biamonte said: “So what if they copied the equations down wrong, Rick and Morty is the best thing to[…]

World Scientific Publishing

Quantum Techniques in Stochastic Mechanics – Book Published

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Our book is now available through World Scientific Publishing. A preprint of the book remains open access on the arXiv and here. The book was published as Quantum Techniques in Stochastic Mechanics John C. Baez and Jacob D. Biamonte World Scientific Publishing, 276 pages (2018) [link to get the book from WS] The book constructs a detailed analogy between quantum mechanics and the theory of random processes. We called the latter stochastic mechanics. The book should be of interest to graduate students and advanced undergraduates who are leaning quantum theory.  It should also be of interest to reachers working in statistical physics and complex network theory who are interested in using[…]

Ising Hamiltonian Formulation of Boolean Operations and Gates

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D-Wave Systems Inc. builds annealing devices that exhibit quantum effects.  These devices as well as other physical systems implement a programmable Ising model of the form.

\begin{equation}
H = \sum_i c_i Z_i+\sum_{ ij} c_{ij}Z_iZ_j
\end{equation} […]

Tensor Networks Initiative

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Tensor networks gave rise to efficiently compact representations for certain classes of quantum states, and provide a graphical language to reason about quantum processes.

The methods reach outside of physics to large areas of computer science and even more recently have found applications in complex networks. […]