The race to build a quantum computer
Dave Bacon · Physics World · 2009
When Russian physicist Alexei Kitaev heard from a colleague that Peter Shor, a researcher from Bell Labs in New Jersey, had discovered an algorithm for factoring numbers on a quantum computer, he got excited. Kitaev had long pondered how the – at the time – obscure field of quantum computation could be useful, and he knew that the Bell Labs result was likely to radically change our understanding of computing. This was a major result that he just had to understand.