Hearne Eminent Lecture with Professor Nilanjana Datta

Entropy - ubiquitous, enigmatic and essential

Entropy, a word familiar to many of us, plays a fundamental role in several branches of science, including thermodynamics, statistical physics, information theory, cosmology and chemistry. It is also used in fields as diverse as art, religion, economics and literature. In the exciting and fast-developing field of quantum information theory, there are a plethora of different entropies. They arise naturally in the study of quantum analogues of familiar and essential tasks, e.g. the compression of digital images for efficient storage, the reliable transmission of messages over a crackling telephone line etc. In this lecture, I will give an overview of entropy in some of its many guises, focusing in particular on those which are relevant to classical and quantum information theory.

Bio:

Nilanjana Datta is a Professor of Quantum Information Theory in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She received her PhD in Mathematical Physics at ETH Zurich in 1995, and joined the  University of Cambridge in 2001, after holding postdoctoral positions in various European institutions, including CNRS Marseille, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Datta started her career in mathematical physics but became interested in the exciting field of quantum information theory after joining Cambridge. Since then, she has focussed her research in this field, contributing to topics such as quantum state transfer, memory effects in quantum information theory, lossy data compression, quantum dynamical semigroups and functional inequalities, and one-shot quantum information theory.  A major direction of her research concerns quantum entropies.