Tommaso Toffoli

Tommaso Toffoli is an Italian-American professor of computer and electrical engineering at Boston University. He is also known as the inventor of the Toffoli gate. Toffoli was born on June 22, 1943 in Montereale Cellina, Italy and moved to the United States in 1969.

Toffoli attended high school at Liceo–Ginnasio Virgilio in Rome, Italy, and graduated in 1961. Toffoli earned his first PhD in physics at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1967. His thesis topic was "A wide-angle directional detector of cosmic-ray muons, utilizing the Cherenkov effect." In 1977, he earned another PhD in computer and communication sciences at the University of Michigan. His thesis was on "Cellular automata mechanics."

In 1972, Toffoli received a 5-year contract to work as a research associate at the Institute for the Applications of Computation, National Research Council in Rome, Italy. In 1978, Toffoli was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory of Computer Science until 1986, at which point he was promoted to a principal research scientist there. He stayed there until 1995.

In 1995, Toffoli began his career as a professor at Boston University. He was first a research associate professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Department. In 2000, he was appointed to associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. He still works there as of 2021.

The Toffoli gate is the name for a three-qubit reversible logic gate, invented by Toffoli. A logic gate is an idealized model of computation or a physical electronic device that implements a logical operation called a Boolean function. A Boolean function assumes values from a two-element set. The Toffoli gate's reversibility means that any other reversible circuit can be built off of it alone. The Toffoli gate is also called a CCNOT (controlled-controlled-NOT) gate because it has two control qubits and a target qubit.

In 2012, Toffoli was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).He is also a member of their computer society. He is a member of the Mathematical Association of America. He is a member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society of North America (now known as Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society).

Toffoli is an editorial board member of Complex Systems, Journal of Cellular Automata, and International Journal of Unconventional Computing. He is also an editorial board member of Journal of Quantum Information Science.

In 1986, Toffoli and Canadian-American computer scientist Norman Margolus wrote a book together titled Cellular Automata Machines—A New Environment for Modeling. It was released in 1987. In 2011, Toffoli and Gregg Jaeger, professor, began working on a book for Cambridge University Press titled Evolution Regained, but it has yet to be released as of 2021.