Preskill was born on January 19, 1953, in
Highland Park, Illinois. He attended Highland Park High School, from where he graduated as class valedictorian in 1971. Preskill graduated summa cum laude from
Princeton University with an A.B. in physics in 1975, completing his senior thesis, titled "Broken symmetry of the Pseudoscalar Yukawa theory", under the supervision of
Arthur S. Wightman. Preskill received his
Ph.D. in the same subject from
Harvard University in 1980. His graduate adviser at Harvard was
Steven Weinberg. While still a graduate student, Preskill made a name for himself by publishing a paper on the cosmological production of superheavy
magnetic monopoles in
Grand Unified Theories. Since we do not observe any magnetic monopoles, this work pointed out serious flaws in the then current cosmological models, a problem which was later addressed by
Alan Guth and others by proposing the idea of
cosmic inflation. After three years as a junior fellow of the
Harvard Society of Fellows, Preskill became associate professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1983, rising to full professorship in 1990. Since 2000 he has been the director of the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. In recent years most of his work has been in mathematical issues related to
quantum computation and quantum
information theory. He is known for coining the term "Quantum Supremacy" in a 2012 paper. Preskill has achieved some notoriety in the popular press as party to a number of
bets involving fellow theoretical physicists
Stephen Hawking and
Kip Thorne. Hawking conceded the
Thorne–Hawking–Preskill bet in 2004 and gave Preskill a copy of
Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia. Preskill was elected as a Fellow of the
American Physical Society in 1991 and a member of the
National Academy of Sciences in 2014. ==See also==