When I was student, I was interested in quantum optics: my first paper was about quantum non-linear optics. Quantum computing has become a new hype in telecommunication and computing. So I wanted to understand by myself how quantum computing works (thanks Wikipedia!).
Starting with a reminder of quantum mechanics principles, I will explain what is a “quantum computer”, what are “qubits”, “quantum registers”, “quantum logical gates” and give some examples of “quantum algorithms” such as quantum “teleportation”, Shor’s algorithm for integer factorization and several other ones.
I will also show how we can play with quantum computers (python libraries, LaTeX packages, web sites).
In terms of knowledge requirement, you just need to know a bit of linear algebra (calculation with square matrices on complex numbers) and accept the quantum physical rules as they are (maybe the most difficult aspect!): a quantum computer is just a system that processes unitary transformations on complex vectors (i.e., multiplications by unitary complex matrices)!
The material of the two sessions will be available at:
http://www.ludovic-noirie.fr/sciences/quantum-computing/