David Deutsch

David Deutsch is a British physicist best known for his work in quantum computing. He pioneered the theoretical framework for quantum computing and is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. His books The Fabric of Reality (1997) and The Beginning of Infinity (2011) explore the nature of knowledge and scientific progress. He has received awards including the Dirac Prize (1998) and the Isaac Newton Medal (2021).

David Deutsch was born on 18 May 1953 in Haifa, Israel. His parents, Oskar and Tikva Deutsch, later moved to London, where he was educated at Geneva House School and William Ellis School. He studied science at Clare College, Cambridge, before completing his doctorate at Wolfson College, Oxford. His research focused on quantum field theory in curved space-time under the supervision of Dennis Sciama and Philip Candelas.

After completing his PhD, Deutsch worked at the University of Texas at Austin before returning to Oxford. Since 1999, he has been a non-stipendiary Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, affiliated to the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008 and is an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.

His 1985 paper introduced the concept of a universal quantum computer and formally described a quantum Turing machine. In 1992, he and Richard Jozsa extended this work to develop the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, an early example of a quantum algorithm showing exponential speedup over classical methods. His contributions also include advances in quantum logic gates, quantum error correction, and the theory of quantum computational networks.

Deutsch's first book, The Fabric of Reality (1997), presents a framework that combines quantum physics, epistemology, computation and evolutionary theory. He argues for the many-worlds interpretation as a central aspect of scientific realism. His second book, The Beginning of Infinity (2011), explores the role of explanation in scientific and cultural progress, linking human creativity to an open-ended process of knowledge creation. He describes the Enlightenment as the beginning of an infinite sequence of discoveries.

Since 2012, Deutsch has focused on constructor theory, a generalisation of quantum computation that aims to describe all physical processes in terms of possible and impossible transformations. In collaboration with Chiara Marletto, he published a paper in 2014 outlining the constructor theory's approach to information.

David Deutsch received the Edge of Computation Science Prize in 2005, the Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 2017, and the Micius Quantum Prize in 2018. In 2022, he will receive the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Photo credit: www.daviddeutsch.org.uk