Picturing Quantum Software

An Introduction to the ZX-Calculus and Quantum Compilation

By Aleks Kissinger and John van de Wetering

In this repository you can find the newest preprint version of the book Picturing Quantum Software: An Introduction to the ZX-Calculus and Quantum Compilation, written by Aleks Kissinger and John van de Wetering. Download the latest version of the PDF here, or under Releases on the right side of this page, or check out the web-friendly HTML version here.

A black and white version for printing and for readers with limited colour vision is also available here.

This book is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence, meaning you are free to distribute copies and adapt the material, as long as you give appropriate credit to the source material and do not use the material for commercial purposes.

If you find any errors or want to suggest any changes, feel free to leave an Issue. If you do so, please note which version of the book you are using (look under About This Version at the start of your copy of the book).

We have already been teaching courses based on these materials for several years. See for example this course at Oxford and this one at the Unversity of Amsterdam. If you want to teach a course based on this book, get in touch! We can provide problem sheets, models solutions, curricula and advice.

Here is the unofficial cover, featuring the book's mascot Coco the Crow:

If you want to cite this book, you can do so as follows:

  @book{KissingerWetering2024Book,
    author = {Kissinger, Aleks and van de Wetering, John},
    title = {{Picturing Quantum Software: An Introduction to the ZX-Calculus and Quantum Compilation}},
    year = {2024},
    publisher = {Preprint},
}

Happy reading and learning!