The Power of Mathematics: Can we turn Software Engineers into Quantum Founders?
Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is one of the most influential VCs in the world and popular among wannabe software founders in Silicon Valley & beyond. The firm’s partners are also well versed in giving exciting talks about the future. In fact, one of our favorite talks is ‘The End of Cloud Computing’ by Peter Levine - partner at a16z. One particular passage of Peter Levine’s talk, that we’ve highlighted in bold, caught the interest of our team:
‘‘We are going to move to a world of data-centric programming. I believe the cloud disaggregates into this new model. Right now, we’re teaching everyone to code logic. However, we’re going to use data to actually solve problems, and so the next generation of coders will have to be mathematicians and data analysts. There’s a transformation of the type of talent that we’re going to be needing in terms of this particular information. I also believe that there will be new programming languages developed specifically around the notion of data processing and data analytics that are very specific to use cases.’’ - Peter Levine, partner at a16z
The observation above is even more true when it comes to the emerging field of quantum computing (QC)! As you can see, despite a lot of noise with tools promising to get people into QC without or with minimal mathematics, the hard truth is one cannot hide from mathematics. Especially if one wants to make non-trivial contributions to the field in the area of quantum algorithms!
Quantum Formalism Purpose
Last week we unveiled the course format at Quantumformalism.com. The program aims to reduce the mathematical barrier to QC. We are targeting the following:
Wanna Be QC Pros: People from diverse technical backgrounds with a desire to get into QC as professionals, but that have a limited mathematical background. Exceptional mainstream software engineers in particular, with experience working in modern industry paradigms such as high scale distributed systems and infrastructure as code.
Existing QC Pros: Current QC pros who want to be exposed to advanced mathematical toolkits used by mathematical physicists. These will likely be people who might have got into QC via a non academic route and so have limited mathematical background.
Our thesis is that with their high standard of programming skills, these professionals that we will call ‘quantum mathematicians’, will then be armed with mathematics as a toolkit that can be used to not just create new practical algorithms, but also implement these using their programming skills. Currently, a lot of the modern algorithm development in the QC industry is being driven mostly by people who are former academics that are now working for large industry players such as IBM and Google or have started their own companies. The result of this is that most advancements are made by people with a mindset predominantly found in academia rather than industry, this leads to an emphasis on paper publications over code.
Next-gen Quantum Software Founders?
Ultimately, we hope that some of the engineers taking part in our course will go on to start new quantum software companies that genuinely challenge the existing quantum startup ecosystem which is largely dominated by academic founders.
Course Approach
The following graph highlights our general teaching approach.
Of course, we recognize that it is a very ambitious program and that people may start dropping out as the mathematics becomes harder. However, we are hopeful that there will be few out of 100+ admitted around the world that will see it through. Either way, we can’t wait to start the journey on Friday, September 18th! :) Please feel free to follow the course blog: https://quantumformalism.substack.com/