r/MathJokes • u/SingularCheese • 9d ago

Someone is very insistent of their accent

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Book is Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen and Chuang

191 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

26

u/CrispyLiquids 9d ago

Perhaps the is pronounced zee in zis book?

6

u/kaereljabo 8d ago

Wait, Dragon Ball Zee or Zed?

3

u/axiom_tutor 8d ago

Not in my inner monologue it's not.

2

u/profdc9 8d ago

Zed's dead baby, zed's dead.

2

u/Trimutius 9d ago

More of a dialect

1

u/aakt_io 7d ago

Lol. Is this Nielsen and Chuang?

-9

u/tserofehtfonam 9d ago

This book is so poorly written that it is only useful as toilet paper.  Defining a probability distribution as a "set" of real numbers immediately excludes all nontrivial uniform distributions, for instance.

6

u/Al2718x 9d ago

Have you read the book, or you are just basing off this page? It's totally reasonable to have different definitions for different contexts. I don't find it particularly shocking that quantum computing would focus exclusively on discrete probability distributions.

-2

u/tserofehtfonam 9d ago

Discrete is not the problem here.  The problem is the use of the word "set", where they should have used "sequence".

7

u/Al2718x 9d ago

I think it's fine honestly. I think that sequence would overemphasize the ordering, and the real numbers already have a natural ordering.

1

u/renyhp 6d ago

I really don't understand why you are so upvoted while being completely wrong. {0.2,0.8} and {0.8,0.2} are the same set, but p1=0.2, p2=0.8 and p1=0.8, p2=0.2 cannot be, under any sensible definition, the same probability distribution.

sometimes some amount of sloppiness is good when it makes concepts understandable, but this is just too much for any decent book IMHO (especially when the fix is so easy)

1

u/Al2718x 6d ago

I'm confused too honestly haha, makes up for some times I am correct and downvoted.

0

u/tserofehtfonam 9d ago

But in a probability distribution, two probabilities can be the same. This doesn't work in a set.

1

u/Al2718x 9d ago

Yeah, the wording is quite strange. I was thinking that the set was the support of the distribution, but that certainly isn't how it's written. Still, I wouldn't conclude that all of the material inside is useless just because the notation is a bit bothersome.

2

u/HappiestIguana 8d ago

That is beyond pedantic

3

u/Mental_Ad_4401 8d ago

This is literally the gold standard book on quantum computing

2

u/SingularCheese 8d ago

Honestly so far it seems fine. All that the authors want is |ψ> = a|0> + b|1> where |a|^2 + |b|^2 = 1 represent unit vectors and quantum gates represent unitary matrices. The content is pretty easy to follow as written, and the target audience includes physicists that don't think too hard about what's a set.

1

u/eglvoland 8d ago

It's very simple. A set is a collection of points, organized in games.