
An elementary introduction to the geometry of quantum states with a picture book - blopeur
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06688
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DougN7
Maybe I clicked the wrong link but I would hardly call that PDF a picture book

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Pharmakon
As with “elementary” you have to see this in the broader context of Quantum
Mechanics, a truly weird and Byzantine theoretical architecture. Anything that
isn’t pages of bra-ket notation with occasional words “naturally follows
from...” is elementary. Anything that isn’t just a load of linear algebra, but
includes the odd diagram is a “picture book.”

Quantum Mechanics, it’s amazing, but it’s hard to wade into.

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dr_dshiv
Are there opportunities for improving its representational design?

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LolWolf
It’s possible to do this subsets of stuff, but rewriting QM in a better way is
at least as difficult as rewriting the linear algebra of hermitian operators
in a way that is easily palatable.

While QM is somewhat of a new development, linear algebra has been around for
nearly 150+ years in its roughly modern form (and far longer in less general
forms, since around the classical Islamic empire). It is possible we now have
better abstractions, but this is also generally unclear.

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hi41
The equations next to the diagrams, it will take a million years for me to
understand them.

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mhh__
If you start now - and you get hooked - give it a year or two and you'll be
there

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hackernewsacct
Why do mathematicians and physicist use the words “elementary” and
“introduction” for advanced textbooks in the field? Is it to flex intellectual
powress?

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LolWolf
“Elementary” doesn’t mean “what you learned in elementary school,” although it
is publically perceived as such.

Almost universally, in almost every text I’ve read, it means “use tools that
are well-known to people with an undergraduate degree in a related field, or
simple extensions thereof.” (There are some cheeky counter-examples, such as
Weil’s Basic Number Theory, but this is far more rare.)

In the same way you cannot expect someone who has never seen a circuit or
understand logic gates to construct a processor, you cannot expect someone
without any mathematical maturity (e.g. basic linear algebra and calculus) to
use QM in any fashion other than understand the most basic of constructions.

