Mark McMahon Wilde ’98, Associate Professor in the Cornell School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, recognized for contributions to the relative-entropy framework and theorems for quantum communications. This is the highest grade of IEEE membership and a milestone career achievement.

“I’ve been working hard on research in quantum information science (QIS) for many years now,” Wilde said, “so it meant a lot to me personally to receive this news.”

Wilde played a critical role in developing new kinds of quantum relative entropies, which are formulas used for quantifying distinguishability, information, and entanglement in quantum states. His work also improves upon a fundamental data-processing inequality for the most important quantum relative entropy, and this improvement has now been used in a wide variety of contexts, not only for understanding correcting errors in quantum computers, but also for understanding how information is processed in theories of quantum gravity.

Wilde also helped establish various fundamental limits for information transmission over quantum channels, which will be useful for understanding what’s possible in a future quantum internet. This is the subject of his published textbook, Quantum Information Theory (more information is available on his website, www.markwilde.com).

Read Cornell’s press release…