Asher Peres

Who was Asher Peres?

Asher Peres was an Israeli physicist, considered a pioneer in quantum information theory, as well is the connections between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

According to his autobiography, he was born Aristide Pressman in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne in France, where his father, a Polish electrical engineer, had found work laying down power lines. He was given the name Aristide at birth, because the name his parents wanted, Asher, the name of his maternal grandfather, was not on the list of permissible French given names. When he went to live in Israel, he changed his first name to Asher and, as was common among immigrants, changed his family name to the Hebrew Peres, which he used for the rest of his life.

Peres obtained his Ph.D. in 1959 at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology under Nathan Rosen. Peres spent most of his academic career at Technion, where in 1988 he was appointed distinguished professor of physics.

Peres is well known for his work relating quantum mechanics and information theory, an approach which is extensively used in his textbook referenced below. Among other things, he helped to develop the Peres-Horodecki criterion for quantum entanglement, as well as the concept of quantum teleportation, and collaborated with others on quantum information and special relativity. He also introduced the Peres metric and researched the Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation in general relativity. With M. Feingold, he published what is known to mathematicians as the Feingold-Peres conjecture and to physicists as the Feingold-Peres theory.