Bouncing Balls and Quantum Computing

The history of science and mathematics includes many examples of surprising parallels between seemingly unrelated fields. Sometimes these similarities drive both fields forward in profound ways, although often they are just amusing.

In December, Adam Brown, a physicist at Google, described a surprisingly precise relationship between a foundational quantum-computing algorithm and a whimsical method of calculating the irrational number π. "It's just a curiosity at the moment," but "the aspiration might be that if you find new ways to think about things, that people will use that to later make connections that they'd not previously been able to make," Brown said. "It's very useful to have more than one way to think about a given phenomenon."