Teaching Quantum Algorithms

It's Thursday of week 1 of the second semester of our academic year and I've just given my first lecture of a new module that covers quantum algorithms.  I've been teaching here for more than 20 years, but it's a rare thing to be teaching a new module, to have the fun (and fear) of designing and writing and then delivering a set of material.  I must say, it was with a little trepadation that I prepared for the first lecture today.  I knew there would be students of various different academic backgrounds.  For example, some are on our one year MSc course in Applied Quantum Computing, which does not have an undergraduate physics degree as a prerequisite, while others are in their final year of our undergrad Physics programme and will have seen plenty of quantum mechanics so far. 

Having giving the first lecture and run the first tutorial class (back to back in an overall 3h session) I feel quite relieved to have got started and been able to do the best part of teaching - to have the students there and be able to interact with them and get a sense of how well they understand what is going on.  

I'm actually teaching two brand-new courses this semester, with the first lecture of the other one happening tomorrow.  I'm now looking forward to that one.  It's on quantum simulation, so not a million miles away from today's lecture, but a bit more niche, and only for Master's students. 

The obligatory photo I like to include with each post is rendered difficult because I didn't take a photo of my class... which is probably wise as I don't think it's very easy to get freely-given consent to take and share a photo in such a situation, so here is a screen shot of my development environment for this module.  I am writing the lecture notes in a Jupyter notebook, so that I can intersperse code examples when necessary.  I am seeing this error message a lot probably because I am trying to load up the notebook from different computers from the same location on a shared drive, and some file locking issue is happening.  Alas.