The Story of BQP

I’ll tell a story about Umesh Vazirani’s central role in quantum computer science by focusing on his most famous brainchild: the class BQP (Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time) — from its prehistory, to the Bernstein-Vazirani and BBBV papers establishing its basic properties, to recent developments including the Raz-Tal, Mahadev, and Yamakawa-Zhandry theorems.