This page is meant to outline the sources that are frequently referenced throughout this crash course.
While one-off sources are listed in the note pages themselves, the sources mentioned here are used consistently across multiple lessons. They provide a deeper look into the topics and are great for refreshing yourself on quantum algorithms.
The first is Peter Shor's quantum computing lecture notes. Professor Shor teaches a class at MIT on quantum computing and has made some of his lecture notes public. This is a really cool and useful resources to learn about quantum algorithms, particularly from a mathematical perspective, taught by, perhaps, the top expert in the field.
In fact, we heavily draw upon his ideas for our notes on the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, Simon's algorithm, QFT, phase estimation, and Shor's algorithm.
Another resource that's helpful, particularly in later lessons, is Pennylane's demonstrations. The examples are really cool and offer a computational perspective to a lot of these algorithms at an advanced level. While we chose not to use the Pennylane SDK during the lessons, as it would be too much for beginners, their articles are super useful: particularly the demos on Grover's algorithm, QFT, phase estimation, and VQE.
Another resource worth highlighting is IBM Quantum Learning, which provides robust tutorials on many different subjects in quantum computing in Qiskit, which is the main SDK we will be using as part of the lessons. They're primarily useful for a coverage of the fundamentals, but are also used for the VQE notes.
A great but more advanced resource is the Classiq library, which provides documentation on a bunch of quantum algorithms implemented using the Classiq SDK, which is a more scalable and perhaps more intuitive tool for programmers. We will use Classiq in one of the lessons, but it is a resource that is more advanced due to some of its abstractions.
Lastly, other than some one-off articles or papers mentioned in the lessons themselves, we rely on the notes written Adam Godel: the founder of BU Quantum. Adam worked on the glued trees algorithm for Classiq and is currently a WISER Quantum Solutions Launchpad Fellow working with the US Naval Nuclear Lab.
You get out of this material as much as you put into it, and a lot of the content we reference is optional.
That being said, if you work through each page and the supplementary pages that go with it, you will come away with a detailed mathematical and computational understanding of quantum computing.
If you just want to look at a few lessons, you'll get a good sense of what quantum computing is like and what parts of it are fit for you.
Regardless of how you approach this club, we hope you can gain something useful out of it and gain an understanding for this growing, somewhat underappreciated, and often misconceived field.