Benjamin Schumacher

Who is Benjamin Schumacher?

Benjamin Schumacher is a U.S. theoretical physicist, working mostly in the field of quantum information theory.

He discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information in a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as quantum information theory.

Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit along with William Wootters of Williams College, which is to quantum computation as a bit is to traditional computation.

He is the author of Physics in Spacetime, a textbook on Special Relativity, and is also a professor at Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in rural Ohio. Also he holds the lecture on Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World in The Teaching Company program.

Schumacher earned his bachelors degree at Hendrix College and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.