What do you think?
Rate this book
The Joy of Quantum Computing: A Concise Introduction
An engaging and accessible presentation of the most famous algorithms and applications of quantum computing
The Joy of Quantum Computing introduces quantum computing succinctly, and with minimal mathematical formalism. Engagingly written—a feast for the reader’s inner nerd—it presents the most famous algorithms and applications of quantum computing and quantum information science, including the “killer apps,” Grover’s search algorithm, and Shor’s factoring algorithm. The only prerequisite is precalculus; readers need no knowledge of quantum physics. Matrices are relegated to the (completely optional) final two chapters. The book shows readers that quantum information science is about more than just high-speed calculations and data security. It is also about the fundamental meaning of quantum mechanics and the ultimate nature of reality.
The Joy of Quantum Computing is suitable for classroom use or independent study by questing autodidacts.
• Offers detailed explanations of quantum circuits, quantum algorithms, and quantum mysteries
• Explains how to apply quantum information science to cryptography (and how Shor’s algorithm menaces classical cryptography)
• Introduces the mystifying topics of quantum teleportation and the no-cloning theorem
• Discusses Bell inequalities, which permit experimental tests of philosophical assumptions
• Presents a simple model of quantum decoherence, shedding light on Schrodinger’s mysterious cat
The Joy of Quantum Computing introduces quantum computing succinctly, and with minimal mathematical formalism. Engagingly written—a feast for the reader’s inner nerd—it presents the most famous algorithms and applications of quantum computing and quantum information science, including the “killer apps,” Grover’s search algorithm, and Shor’s factoring algorithm. The only prerequisite is precalculus; readers need no knowledge of quantum physics. Matrices are relegated to the (completely optional) final two chapters. The book shows readers that quantum information science is about more than just high-speed calculations and data security. It is also about the fundamental meaning of quantum mechanics and the ultimate nature of reality.
The Joy of Quantum Computing is suitable for classroom use or independent study by questing autodidacts.
• Offers detailed explanations of quantum circuits, quantum algorithms, and quantum mysteries
• Explains how to apply quantum information science to cryptography (and how Shor’s algorithm menaces classical cryptography)
• Introduces the mystifying topics of quantum teleportation and the no-cloning theorem
• Discusses Bell inequalities, which permit experimental tests of philosophical assumptions
• Presents a simple model of quantum decoherence, shedding light on Schrodinger’s mysterious cat
- GenresMathematics
200 pages, Paperback
Published July 29, 2025
5 people are currently reading
10 people want to read
About the author
Jed Brody
5 books5 followersJed Brody is Senior Lecturer in Physics at Emory University, where he has taught an interdisciplinary course on quantum entanglement.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 3, 2025
This is one of those rare books that makes you laugh at your own ignorance while simultaneously making you want to dive headfirst into concepts that, if left to textbooks, would probably make you want to hide under the bed.
Brody writes with the lightness of a storyteller and the persistence of a teacher who believes that the world is not only understandable but fun to understand—even when that world is the strange, slippery, counterintuitive domain of quantum mechanics.
The first thing that leaps off the page is Brody’s sense of audience. He knows we’re sceptical. He knows we’ve heard words like “superposition”, “qubits”, “entanglement”, and maybe nodded politely at cocktail parties while secretly thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like wizardry, not science.” But instead of scolding us for our ignorance, he beckons us closer with metaphors, jokes, paradoxes, and just enough mathematics to keep us honest. The result is not a watered-down science-for-dummies manual, but a genuine invitation to the joy he feels when he contemplates this bizarre new paradigm of computing.
And make no mistake—'joy' is the operative word here. This isn’t a dry technical book, though it has technical rigour embedded in it. It’s suffused with delight, the kind of delight that scientists sometimes forget to communicate.
Brody is very aware that quantum computing is not simply a tool or a technique; it’s a philosophical provocation. It asks us to rethink what it means to “know” something, to measure, to compute, to process reality. In that sense, the book is less about programming a quantum computer and more about learning to inhabit a new way of thinking.
Reading this during Puja week gave the experience an uncanny richness. In the streets outside, drums and conch shells echoed through the night; rituals of paradox unfolded: the goddess Durga worshipped as maiden and mother, mortal and eternal, destroyer and nurturer.
Inside, in Brody’s pages, I encountered Schrödinger’s cat, a creature both alive and dead until observed; qubits that can be both zero and one at the same time; entangled states in which two particles across the universe share an invisible bond, behaving as one. Ritual paradox and quantum paradox began to feel like cousins. Both remind us that the binary logic of everyday life—either/or, yes/no, alive/dead, sacred/profane—is inadequate for capturing the complexity of reality. Both suggest that truth lives in simultaneity, in the space between contradictions.
Brody structures the book as an unfolding conversation with the reader. He begins with the basics, walking us from classical computing—bits, circuits, logic gates—into the peculiar twists of quantum computing. He reminds us of how traditional computers are, at bottom, binary machines: zeros and ones, off and on, processed with unimaginable speed but never escaping the boundaries of classical logic.
Then he shows how quantum computing breaks the mould, how qubits are not simply zero or one but exist in superpositions, holding probabilities until an act of measurement collapses them into definite states. He shows how entanglement allows information to be shared across particles instantaneously, in defiance of what Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance”.
The metaphors are what make these ideas stick. A coin spinning in the air is like a qubit in superposition: not heads, not tails, but potentially both until it lands. Cats in boxes—half dead, half alive—remind us that quantum mechanics resists neat classification.
A pair of shoes, one left and one right, separated by distance but always paired, becomes a metaphor for entanglement. These images are playful, almost childlike, but they’re also deeply effective. They remind us that metaphor is not simplification; it’s a bridge, a way of making strangeness comprehensible without stripping it of mystery.
One of Brody’s key strengths is that he doesn’t flinch from the weirdness. He doesn’t try to explain it away or pretend that quantum computing is just classical computing with a few fancy tricks. Instead, he revels in the weirdness. He invites us to dwell in the discomfort, to find beauty in the fact that reality resists simplification. And that, perhaps, is where the book rises beyond science writing into something more like philosophy. He insists, gently but firmly, that quantum computing is not just a technology—it’s a worldview. It teaches us humility about what we can know. It teaches us to see complexity not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be embraced.
This philosophical undercurrent resonated with me particularly during Puja. After all, Puja itself is a festival of layered paradoxes. The goddess is simultaneously myth and presence, simultaneously worshipped in Kolkata pandals and imagined in cosmic battlefields. The rituals are ancient yet constantly reinvented. The same dhak beats I heard as a child still echo, but the context—smartphones raised to record, Instagram reels posted in real time—has shifted. Durga is both timeless and always newly born. Reading about qubits existing in superposition while surrounded by rituals of paradox gave me a sudden clarity: both religion and science, at their most profound, ask us to confront the insufficiency of binary categories. They ask us to make peace with ambiguity.
Brody’s joy is also pedagogical. He delights in the small victories of understanding. When he introduces a mathematical idea—a matrix, a probability amplitude—he doesn’t wield it like a weapon to intimidate the non-specialist reader. Instead, he uses it sparingly, almost like seasoning, to show how the math encodes the strangeness of the quantum world. He trusts his readers to stretch themselves, to struggle a little, but he never abandons them in abstraction. And when he senses that the technicalities might be getting too heavy, he rescues us with another metaphor, another joke, another image that brings the concept down to earth.
What also struck me is his honesty about what quantum computing can and cannot do. The hype around the field is enormous—headlines about unbreakable cryptography, about quantum supremacy, about revolutions in AI. Brody acknowledges the potential but is also careful to ground expectations. Quantum computing, he insists, is not magic. It doesn’t make classical computing obsolete; it complements it. There are problems quantum computers can solve more efficiently, yes, but there are many tasks for which classical computing remains sufficient. His balance between enthusiasm and caution is refreshing in a field where hype often outpaces reality.
There’s also an ethical dimension woven through the book. By insisting that quantum computing is not merely a technical advance but a shift in worldview, Brody hints at its cultural implications. How will societies organise themselves if computation itself becomes probabilistic?
What does it mean for human decision-making when machines are built not on certainties but on probabilities and entanglements? These questions are not explored in depth, but they are gestured toward, and in the gaps, the reader is invited to speculate. For me, the thought was both thrilling and unsettling: perhaps our very notion of truth will be reshaped by quantum paradigms.
The Puja connection deepened this thought. Rituals like puja are not about facts or certainties; they are about meaning, community, and continuity. They embrace symbols that are both literal and metaphorical. Durga is a clay idol and a goddess; she is simultaneously a story from the past and a force in the present. This doubleness is precisely what quantum mechanics insists upon. Truth is not singular. It is layered, entangled, and coexisting. Reading Brody while listening to the sounds of puja made me realise that science and ritual are not opposites. There are two ways of grappling with the same paradox: that reality is richer than binary categories can capture.
As the book unfolded, I felt myself becoming part of Brody’s classroom. His tone reminded me of a teacher who knows you are sceptical but trusts your curiosity. And the joy he communicates is contagious. I began to see quantum metaphors everywhere. The crowded pandal with people pressing in from every direction became a metaphor for entanglement. The flicker of oil lamps, never quite steady, reminded me of quantum uncertainty. Even the act of giving anjali—hands joined, flowers offered—seemed like a moment of superposition, where devotion is both deeply personal and profoundly collective.
By the end of the book, what remained with me was not a technical understanding of how to build a quantum algorithm—though Brody certainly introduces the building blocks—but a philosophical shift. I realised that quantum computing is not simply about faster or more powerful machines. It is about learning to think differently, to accept that the universe itself resists simplification, and that complexity is not an obstacle but a feature.
The joy of the book is precisely this: it makes you fall in love not only with a field of science but with the strangeness of existence itself. It whispers that the world is far richer, far weirder, and far more beautiful than our categories can contain. It invites you to live, at least for a while, in the superposition between knowledge and mystery.
For me, reading Brody’s *The Joy of Quantum Computing* during Puja will always be inseparable from that week: the streets glowing with lights, the air thick with incense, the rhythms of ritual everywhere, and in my hands a book about qubits and paradoxes. Together they formed a symphony of contradictions, a reminder that joy lies not in resolving paradox but in inhabiting it fully.
Brody writes with the lightness of a storyteller and the persistence of a teacher who believes that the world is not only understandable but fun to understand—even when that world is the strange, slippery, counterintuitive domain of quantum mechanics.
The first thing that leaps off the page is Brody’s sense of audience. He knows we’re sceptical. He knows we’ve heard words like “superposition”, “qubits”, “entanglement”, and maybe nodded politely at cocktail parties while secretly thinking, “Yeah, that sounds like wizardry, not science.” But instead of scolding us for our ignorance, he beckons us closer with metaphors, jokes, paradoxes, and just enough mathematics to keep us honest. The result is not a watered-down science-for-dummies manual, but a genuine invitation to the joy he feels when he contemplates this bizarre new paradigm of computing.
And make no mistake—'joy' is the operative word here. This isn’t a dry technical book, though it has technical rigour embedded in it. It’s suffused with delight, the kind of delight that scientists sometimes forget to communicate.
Brody is very aware that quantum computing is not simply a tool or a technique; it’s a philosophical provocation. It asks us to rethink what it means to “know” something, to measure, to compute, to process reality. In that sense, the book is less about programming a quantum computer and more about learning to inhabit a new way of thinking.
Reading this during Puja week gave the experience an uncanny richness. In the streets outside, drums and conch shells echoed through the night; rituals of paradox unfolded: the goddess Durga worshipped as maiden and mother, mortal and eternal, destroyer and nurturer.
Inside, in Brody’s pages, I encountered Schrödinger’s cat, a creature both alive and dead until observed; qubits that can be both zero and one at the same time; entangled states in which two particles across the universe share an invisible bond, behaving as one. Ritual paradox and quantum paradox began to feel like cousins. Both remind us that the binary logic of everyday life—either/or, yes/no, alive/dead, sacred/profane—is inadequate for capturing the complexity of reality. Both suggest that truth lives in simultaneity, in the space between contradictions.
Brody structures the book as an unfolding conversation with the reader. He begins with the basics, walking us from classical computing—bits, circuits, logic gates—into the peculiar twists of quantum computing. He reminds us of how traditional computers are, at bottom, binary machines: zeros and ones, off and on, processed with unimaginable speed but never escaping the boundaries of classical logic.
Then he shows how quantum computing breaks the mould, how qubits are not simply zero or one but exist in superpositions, holding probabilities until an act of measurement collapses them into definite states. He shows how entanglement allows information to be shared across particles instantaneously, in defiance of what Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance”.
The metaphors are what make these ideas stick. A coin spinning in the air is like a qubit in superposition: not heads, not tails, but potentially both until it lands. Cats in boxes—half dead, half alive—remind us that quantum mechanics resists neat classification.
A pair of shoes, one left and one right, separated by distance but always paired, becomes a metaphor for entanglement. These images are playful, almost childlike, but they’re also deeply effective. They remind us that metaphor is not simplification; it’s a bridge, a way of making strangeness comprehensible without stripping it of mystery.
One of Brody’s key strengths is that he doesn’t flinch from the weirdness. He doesn’t try to explain it away or pretend that quantum computing is just classical computing with a few fancy tricks. Instead, he revels in the weirdness. He invites us to dwell in the discomfort, to find beauty in the fact that reality resists simplification. And that, perhaps, is where the book rises beyond science writing into something more like philosophy. He insists, gently but firmly, that quantum computing is not just a technology—it’s a worldview. It teaches us humility about what we can know. It teaches us to see complexity not as a problem to be solved but as a condition to be embraced.
This philosophical undercurrent resonated with me particularly during Puja. After all, Puja itself is a festival of layered paradoxes. The goddess is simultaneously myth and presence, simultaneously worshipped in Kolkata pandals and imagined in cosmic battlefields. The rituals are ancient yet constantly reinvented. The same dhak beats I heard as a child still echo, but the context—smartphones raised to record, Instagram reels posted in real time—has shifted. Durga is both timeless and always newly born. Reading about qubits existing in superposition while surrounded by rituals of paradox gave me a sudden clarity: both religion and science, at their most profound, ask us to confront the insufficiency of binary categories. They ask us to make peace with ambiguity.
Brody’s joy is also pedagogical. He delights in the small victories of understanding. When he introduces a mathematical idea—a matrix, a probability amplitude—he doesn’t wield it like a weapon to intimidate the non-specialist reader. Instead, he uses it sparingly, almost like seasoning, to show how the math encodes the strangeness of the quantum world. He trusts his readers to stretch themselves, to struggle a little, but he never abandons them in abstraction. And when he senses that the technicalities might be getting too heavy, he rescues us with another metaphor, another joke, another image that brings the concept down to earth.
What also struck me is his honesty about what quantum computing can and cannot do. The hype around the field is enormous—headlines about unbreakable cryptography, about quantum supremacy, about revolutions in AI. Brody acknowledges the potential but is also careful to ground expectations. Quantum computing, he insists, is not magic. It doesn’t make classical computing obsolete; it complements it. There are problems quantum computers can solve more efficiently, yes, but there are many tasks for which classical computing remains sufficient. His balance between enthusiasm and caution is refreshing in a field where hype often outpaces reality.
There’s also an ethical dimension woven through the book. By insisting that quantum computing is not merely a technical advance but a shift in worldview, Brody hints at its cultural implications. How will societies organise themselves if computation itself becomes probabilistic?
What does it mean for human decision-making when machines are built not on certainties but on probabilities and entanglements? These questions are not explored in depth, but they are gestured toward, and in the gaps, the reader is invited to speculate. For me, the thought was both thrilling and unsettling: perhaps our very notion of truth will be reshaped by quantum paradigms.
The Puja connection deepened this thought. Rituals like puja are not about facts or certainties; they are about meaning, community, and continuity. They embrace symbols that are both literal and metaphorical. Durga is a clay idol and a goddess; she is simultaneously a story from the past and a force in the present. This doubleness is precisely what quantum mechanics insists upon. Truth is not singular. It is layered, entangled, and coexisting. Reading Brody while listening to the sounds of puja made me realise that science and ritual are not opposites. There are two ways of grappling with the same paradox: that reality is richer than binary categories can capture.
As the book unfolded, I felt myself becoming part of Brody’s classroom. His tone reminded me of a teacher who knows you are sceptical but trusts your curiosity. And the joy he communicates is contagious. I began to see quantum metaphors everywhere. The crowded pandal with people pressing in from every direction became a metaphor for entanglement. The flicker of oil lamps, never quite steady, reminded me of quantum uncertainty. Even the act of giving anjali—hands joined, flowers offered—seemed like a moment of superposition, where devotion is both deeply personal and profoundly collective.
By the end of the book, what remained with me was not a technical understanding of how to build a quantum algorithm—though Brody certainly introduces the building blocks—but a philosophical shift. I realised that quantum computing is not simply about faster or more powerful machines. It is about learning to think differently, to accept that the universe itself resists simplification, and that complexity is not an obstacle but a feature.
The joy of the book is precisely this: it makes you fall in love not only with a field of science but with the strangeness of existence itself. It whispers that the world is far richer, far weirder, and far more beautiful than our categories can contain. It invites you to live, at least for a while, in the superposition between knowledge and mystery.
For me, reading Brody’s *The Joy of Quantum Computing* during Puja will always be inseparable from that week: the streets glowing with lights, the air thick with incense, the rhythms of ritual everywhere, and in my hands a book about qubits and paradoxes. Together they formed a symphony of contradictions, a reminder that joy lies not in resolving paradox but in inhabiting it fully.
Displaying 1 of 1 review