Title：Categorical Quantum Mechanics and Its Applications

Speaker：王全龙（牛津大学计算机科学系研究员）

Date： Dec. 4th 15:10-18:00

Room：二教519 (Teaching Building 2, 519)

Abstract：There are two paradigms for western metaphysics: substances and processes. The substance metaphysics sees objects as the basic constituents of the universe, while the process metaphysics take processes rather than objects as fundamental. Here we think that the theory of processes has scientific and philosophical advantages in the modern age, especially for its application in quantum physics. Indeed, if we treat quantum processes as transformations between different types of quantum systems and highlight sequential and parallel compositions of processes, then we arrive at the theory of categorical quantum mechanics (CQM) pioneered by Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke, based on compact closed categories. In this talk, we will give an introduction to the motivation, framework and features of CQM. It seems that CQM is rather abstract and thus useless, but we will show on the contrary that CQM is of practical use as well in some fields like quantum circuits, linguistics and cognition. Finally, we will present some open questions in CQM for further work.