Simon Benjamin · CC BY 3.0

David Deutsch laid theoretical groundwork for a technology before it existed: his description of a universal quantum computer, built on the model of a quantum Turing machine, is treated as founding work in quantum computation and earned him the nickname "father of quantum computing." A physicist at Oxford's Centre for Quantum Computation, he has also been a leading defender of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the view that every quantum measurement branches reality rather than collapsing it to one outcome.