A mathematician under trouble…Lucía Absalom!

Hello everybody! My name is Lucía Absalom and I am a mathematics and statistics undergraduate student at University of Sevilla. When I started looking for a summer scholarship I had in mind something that combined maths and computer science, where I could learn something new and not only did I find the perfect project but it came with a wonderful partner!

I will start by telling you a bit about myself: I love eating, going out with my friends and making new plans. I also love art, philosophy, politics and music, basically everything from classical music, jazz, to 70’s Turkish psychedelic rock. I play the piano, a bit of guitar and I’m learning to play the baglar. I do an internship at my university where we relate algebraic structures with music and somehow we connect concepts like monoids with the musical tempered system. It’s a superb!

I am also a restless person, I would say that I am someone who loves to know new places and cultures. New food, new music, new languages…it’s just fantastic! Last year I took part in the Erasmus program in Munich and next year I will stay in Barcelona so it’s a pity that the summer scholarship was online because I would have had the opportunity to live a couple of months in the Czech Republic!

And now… the scientific part!

I chose to study mathematics because in one way or another I found great satisfaction in solving problems, it was both an entertainment and a challenge. When I started university I discovered a discipline where everything fitted together perfectly and I began to find beauty in the study of theorems and proofs. Although I studied some programming in undergrad, I became interested in computer science in a more serious way when I wanted to know what was behind the software I was using and that’s how I discovered Linux, the place where you can make all your computer dreams come true!

So why quantum computers?

There is certainly something about quantum computers that appeals to me fascinating, and that is that they bring with them a computational revolution. A new class of complexity arises, BQP, (bounded-error quantum polynomial time) which has intersections with both NP (nondeterministic polynomial time) and P (polynomial time) classes. Quantum computers are capable of converting NP-complex problems into BQP-complex problems. For example, the calculation of the factorization of a number, which was previously an NP problem, becomes BQP.

From the beginning, my project partner Andreas was super nice to me and helped me with any computer problems I had in the first week (he is a genius), although I have to admit that I’m starting to get very jealous of all the amazing greek food pictures he sends me!

I think that’s a good summary of me (I hope I didn’t bore you too much).

See you in the next post!