Mathematicians are normally focused on finding solutions, but William Slofstra, assistant professor in pure math at the University of Waterloo, has had breakthroughs in proving that some things can’t be solved.
“We have certain math problems we’d like to solve, like maybe make a calculation and get some number out of it. And the type of thing I’ve been doing has been showing that some of the problems we care about in quantum information and quantum computing, you can’t solve.”
Dr. Slofstra, a winner of the 2021 Sloan Fellowship, says his work in the mathematics of quantum computing can be very satisfying, “especially if you spent time trying to solve these questions, because you’ve just been maybe racking your brains over some problems, and being like, ‘Well, why can’t I solve these problems? Am I going to go on for my entire life not knowing, you know, just feeling that I can’t solve this?’ Well, when you can show that you can’t solve it, then you know, you have some explanation. And you can save a lot of time for yourself and for other people in the future.”
Other researchers have built on Dr. Slofstra’s discoveries, yielding more groundbreaking results.
A member of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, Dr. Slofstra was nominated for the Sloan Fellowship by David McKinnon, chair of the Department of Pure Mathematics. In a university story about the award, he referred to Dr. Slofstra as “rising superstar” in this area of research, a pure mathematician with “enormous talent and potential.”
