Upcoming MOOC: Quantum Mechanics (Coursera)

Coursera will be offering a Berkeley-developed course on Quantum Mechanics, taught by Professor Umesh Varizani. It's currently scheduled to begin on July 17, 2012. It is recommended that students have a comfortable understanding of Linear Algebra (you can study or brush up over at Khan Academy). See the embedded video below for an introduction from the professor.

Much like Coursera's introductory course on algorithms, I'll most likely be viewing the videos of this course to absorb some general information on the topic. I don't expect to have time to complete the assignments, as I'll still be wrapping up my summer session at UIS and ST101 over at Udacity (plus a nice two-week vacation once those are done). Still, it's great to have the opportunity to at least get a basic understanding of a topic that will change our world in the coming decades.

Link to the course: Coursera - Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation

Here's Coursera's description of the course:

Quantum computation is a remarkable subject, and is based on one of the great computational discoveries that computers based on quantum mechanics are exponentially powerful. This course aims to make this cutting-edge material broadly accessible to undergraduate students, including computer science majors who do not have any prior exposure to quantum mechanics. The course will introduce qubits (or quantum bits) and quantum gates, the basic building blocks of quantum computers. It will cover the fundamentals of quantum algorithms, including the quantum fourier transform, period finding, and Shor's iconic quantum algorithm for factoring integers efficiently. The course will also explore the prospects for quantum algorithms for NP-complete problems, quantum cryptography and basic quantum error-correcting codes.

The course will not assume any prior background in quantum mechanics. Instead, it will use the language of qubits and quantum gates to introduce the basic axioms of quantum mechanics. This treatment of quantum mechanics has the advantage of both being conceptually simple and of highlighting the paradoxes at the heart of quantum mechanics. The most important pre-requisite for the course is a good understanding of basic linear algebra, including orthogonal bases, eigenvectors and eigenvalues.