This startup is building the country’s most powerful quantum computer on Chicago’s South Side

Illinois and DARPA just announced an ambitious $500 million quantum computing campus in Chicago–with PsiQuantum at the center.

In 1994, Peter Shor, an American mathematician working at Bell Labs, published a paper with a wonky title and earth-shaking implications. In “Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer,” Shor showed how, using a hypothetical quantum computer, you could efficiently solve certain types of mathematical problems that overwhelmed even the most powerful classical computer systems—eliminating many, many steps, and cutting the calculation time exponentially.