Raymond Laflamme

Raymond Julien Joseph Laflamme, OC FRSC (French: [ʁɛmɔ̃ ʒyljɛ̃ ʒozɛf laflam]; July 19, 1960 – June 19, 2025) was a Canadian theoretical physicist who was the founder and, until June 2017, the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He was also a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Laflamme was a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information. In December 2017, he was named as one of the appointees to the Order of Canada.

As Stephen Hawking's PhD student, he first became famous for convincing Hawking that time does not reverse in a contracting universe, along with Don Page. Hawking told the story of how this happened in his famous book A Brief History of Time in the chapter The Arrow of Time. Later on, Laflamme made a name for himself in quantum computing and quantum information theory, which was what he later became famous for. In 2005, Laflamme's research group created the world's largest quantum information processor with 12 qubits. Along with Phillip Kaye and Michele Mosca, he published the book An Introduction to Quantum Computing in 2006. In 2024, he published the book Building Quantum Computers with Shayan Majidy and Christopher Wilson.

Laflamme's research focused on understanding the impact of manipulating information using the laws of quantum mechanics, the development of methods to protect quantum information against noise through quantum control and quantum error correction for quantum computing and cryptography, the implementation of ideas and concepts of quantum information processing using nuclear magnetic resonance to develop scalable methods of control of quantum systems, and the development of blueprints for quantum information processors such as linear optical quantum computing.