Origin of The Concept and Term
The concept of the qubit was unknowingly introduced by Stephen Wiesner in 1983, in his proposal for unforgeable quantum money, which he had tried to publish for over a decade.
The coining of the term "qubit" is attributed to Benjamin Schumacher. In the acknowledgments of his paper, Schumacher states that the term qubit was invented in jest (due to its phonological resemblance with an ancient unit of length called cubit), during a conversation with William Wootters. The paper describes a way of compressing states emitted by a quantum source of information so that they require fewer physical resources to store. This procedure is now known as Schumacher compression.
Read more about this topic: Qubit
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