Symmetries and Quantum Mechanics shine at Visiting Scholar Seminars

From Stony Brook to Italy, the Visiting Scholar Seminar Series continued to bring the best and brightest from around the world to the halls of SUNY Poly this past April in order to enlighten and inspire on a variety of topics.

On April 7, 2017, Professor Decio Levi of the University Roma Tre in Italy presented Discretizing the Liouville Equation preserving the symmetries, showing how symmetry structures in partial differential equations can be preserved in a discrete world and reflected in difference schemes.  Alongside the many undergraduate students in attendance for Professor Levi’s discussion, were the entire Departments of Mathematics and Physics.

Professor Levi was visiting with SUNY Poly Professor of Mathematics Dr. Zora Thomova with whom they have a long-standing collaboration and several joint publications. They are working on new projects in the area of symmetries for differential and difference equations.

Just a few days later on April 12, SUNY Poly’s Visiting Scholar Seminar Series welcomed Dr. Tzu-Chieh Wei of SUNY Stony Brook for a discussion titled Quantum computing: When computer science meets quantum mechanics​.

Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University: Assistant Professor in the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics Tzu-Chieh Wei

An expert in the area of measurement based quantum computing models, Dr. Wei discussed the idea of quantum error correction to an audience that included numerous students.

“In order for the quantum computer to retain its coherence and resist errors, a quantum version of error corrections needs to be implemented,” Dr. Wei explains. “As one can see, quantum computation is a natural consequence of putting computation in the framework of quantum mechanical rules.”

Dr. Wei’s expertise in measurement-based quantum computing models is an area closely aligned with the research of SUNY Poly Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science Dr. Chen-Fu Chiang, who invited Dr. Wei for a visit and collaboration.

Both seminars were part of the Visiting Scholar Seminar Series, established several years ago to support research collaboration of faculty with scholars from other universities. The seminar series in 2016-17 academic year is sponsored by the Provost’s office.