Asher Peres, one of the pioneers of quantum information theory, and a notable contributor to many other areas of physics, passed away a few days ago.<\/p>\n
Asher was, among many other things, and in no particular order:<\/p>\n
In 1994 I was doing my undergraduate thesis on Bell’s inequality and possible connections to quasidistribution functions. Excepting Bell’s orignal paper and some papers by Mermin, I was having a hard time finding much that was clear on Bell’s inequality, or its various more modern versions.<\/p>\n
Then Asher’s book arrived at our library.<\/p>\n
Revelation! Suddenly, all the key results of 30 years of work (several of those results due to Asher) were distilled into beautiful and simple explanations.<\/p>\n
The other parts of the book are just as good.<\/p>\n
I didn’t know Asher all that well – we talked more than passingly on only a few occasions – but I have several warm memories of our interactions.<\/p>\n
One was in 2000. I had posted a paper to the preprint archive entitled “On the units of bipartite entanglement: is sixteen ounces always equal to one pound?”<\/p>\n
I had recently left a job at Caltech when I posted that paper. Caltech runs JPL, who at the time were still very embarassed by the loss of the Mars Lander, due to, of all things, a now-famous mistake in unit conversion.<\/p>\n
Shortly after posting the paper, I got a little note in email from Asher that brightened my day and still makes me smile. I post it here because it seems to me very much in Asher’s voice as I knew it:<\/p>\n
“Sixteen ounces? One pound?
\nDon’t people at Caltech know about SI units? Best regards, Asher”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Asher Peres, one of the pioneers of quantum information theory, and a notable contributor to many other areas of physics, passed away a few days ago. Asher was, among many other things, and in no particular order: Very kind and encouraging to a certain very young quantum information theorist he met at the Institute for… Continue reading Asher Peres<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}