A little bit of normality

For a long time, things didn't look good for the last date of the Student University on Saturday for this school year. After all, the university's coronavirus crisis team decided - sensibly - to ban all events for the 2020 summer semester. Professor Jörg Lässig and study scout Daniel Müssig from the Computer Science department were not deterred by this and found a way to make the event possible online.

With the topic of "Quantum Computing", they have put their finger on the pulse of current issues and problems, for example the "problem of the traveling salesman", which companies such as parcel services have to solve on a daily basis: In what order should parcel recipients be delivered so that the route for a parcel carrier is as short as possible, no address is visited twice and he returns to the starting point at the end?

If such so-called combinatorial optimization problems are to be solved quickly and in a resource-saving manner, special computers are needed whose function, in contrast to classical computers, is based on quantum mechanical laws. Quantum computers also deliver much faster and more accurate results for the development of new drugs or encryption algorithms to protect against cyber attacks. Even in the financial sector, for example when calculating entry and exit signals for stock investments, the speed advantages of a quantum computer can make a decisive difference in terms of financial results.

For the participants of the student university, the online event was an excursion into a still very young topic of computer science with enormous future potential. We would like to thank Professor Lässig and Daniel Müssig for organizing the student university as an interactive online lecture!