Dr Lov K. Grover
Award Year: 2021| Degree Year: 1981
Lov Grover received his BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1981. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1984, having previously received master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Caltech and Physics from Stanford. He joined Bell Labs in 1984 as a Member of Technical Staff, working initially in computer-aided design (CAD). During 1984-1987 he designed and implemented a VLSI CAD system based on simulated annealing, which was used to design and produce several thousand AT&T commercial chips. During 1987-1994 he was Visiting Professor at Cornell in the School of Electrical Engineering.
Lov Grover has contributed one of the most significant original results in the field of Quantum Computation and Information Processing: the Grover Search Algorithm. Classical search of an unstructured database with N entries takes order N evaluations. Grover showed in 1996 that this could be accomplished in order square root N evaluations exploiting the power of quantum computation. While this is not an exponential speed-up, nevertheless it is universally recognized as a major milestone, both for its broad applicability to a large variety of problems and also for the new ideas it brought into the field. John Preskill has written “If quantum computers are being used 100 years from now, I would guess that they will be used to run Grover’s algorithm or something like it”. During 1998-2008 he moved to Physics Research at Bell Labs and was promoted to Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2002. He retired in 2008 and has been an independent researcher since then.
In honoring Dr Lov Grover, IIT Delhi recognizes the outstanding contributions made by him in Teaching and Research. Through his achievements, Dr Grover has brought glory to the name of the Institute.
