"As a direct result of this "QWERTY" approach to explaining quantum mechanics - which you can see reflected in almost every popular book and article, down to th

"As a direct result of this "QWERTY" approach to explaining quantum mechanics - which you can see reflected in almost every popular book and article, down to the present -- the subject acquired an undeserved reputation for being hard." The same goes for cryptography. Most cryptography courses spend at least the first hour talking about historical irrelevance like substitution ciphers etc. Crypto I [1] (Dan Boneh) follows the latter approach, i.e. starting from modern theoretical principles, defining security properties in terms of computational complexity and games. I quite liked the Quantum Computing course [2] (Anuj Dawar) from the Cambridge CST, which also followed that approach, though it didn't present this stuff as a "generalisation of probability". No-cloning theorem in 3rd or 4th lecture, IIRC. edit: After reading this article fully, I think it would have made for a good "lecture 0" in the above course, bridging the gap between more elementary maths and it. [1] http://coursera.org/course/crypto http://coursera.org/course/crypto [2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1415/QuantComp/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1415/QuantComp/