April 1996, to Michiel van Lambalgen, “Thesis”

About myself (in case you are wondering) I am a physicist. My research specialty is “quantum information theory,” a field that concerns a hodgepodge of things including quantum cryptography, quantum computing, and statistical inference problems having to do with quantum mechanical systems. You may have heard of some of these things through Paul Vitanyi or André Berthiaume (Vitanyi's postdoc). I am presently a postdoc working for Gilles Brassard and Claude Crépeau in Montréal; starting October, I will have a three year position at Caltech.

I was once interested in the mathematics of randomness because, though I am Bayesian through and through for all other uses of probability, I believed that probabilities for quantum mechanical measurement outcomes were something different…in fact something more akin to the frequentist conception. Thus I put a lot of effort into studying von Mises, Church, Kolmogorov, Martin-Löf, Chaitin, etc. (I didn't find your papers until I had pretty much abandoned this belief, though I'm not sure that I am completely over it!) I had hoped that there might be some mathematical connection between the structures found in quantum theory (vector spaces, positive-operator valued measures, etc.) and the structures required to formalize the notion of random sequences…at least that was my motivation.