Cover of the Asia Literary Review

Its remit was long-form literary journalism of the kind you find in The New Yorker or The Paris Review. What we did was to ignore all the rules. We wrote about Burma and I remember interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi. We featured the persecution of the Shan people and we ended up being banned everywhere. For a while, Singapore banned us, and I went there with a suitcase full of issues and distributed them; it was a wonderful time. Because I wasn’t employed by anyone, we could be fearless.

We did lots of festivals: Bali, Sydney, Bangladesh and everywhere. We pioneered the Hong Kong Literary Festival and our star was Gore Vidal, who was a friend of mine and an absolute giant of the 20th century.”

A Passion for Maths and Quantum Computing

Through the success of his businesses, Ilyas soon became able to follow more of his passions, including mathematics, eventually leading to the foundation of Cambridge Quantum Computing in 2014.

“During this time, I continued with my start-ups. Tech Pacific became really big and I made a substantial amount of money, which allowed me to ‘retire’ in 2008 at the age of 46. This let me focus on charities. I became Chair of Leonard Cheshire Disability for eight years and it was a remarkable experience. It’s a global charity with 140,000 employees in 52 countries providing a range of care for all disabilities.

I took a Maths degree at the Open University and then became really involved in quantum mechanics. Quantum is the nature of reality; everything around us is quantum.

Quantum can be overwhelming because of the notation. If you’re not a mathematician, you might look at it and find it mind-boggling, but like anything – Russian or musical notation – it’s just a language. Once you get beyond that, it is utterly beautiful.

The track to founding Cambridge Quantum Computing was being the inaugural Chair of the Stephen Hawking Foundation – Stephen was a friend – and as the co-founder of Accelerate Cambridge, which was an accelerator for deep science spin-offs.

When Alan Turing came up with the idea of a computer, he actually thought of women writing things down, as in the 1930s, it was often women with pencils and paper. He constructed rules for what we call first-order logic, which was something a number of people, such as German mathematician Gottlob Frege, had come up with in the late 19th century.

Historic counting machines and a quantum computer

‘If this, then that’ - that’s first-order logic, and we add notation to have all the things that create mathematics. But we know that that is not natural. It’s not ‘either this or that’. An example is an acorn. We plant it and 50 years later, there’s a magnificent tree. It didn’t suddenly go from an acorn to a tree; for a long time it wasn’t neither an acorn nor a tree. These are continuums.

In nature, we don’t have first-order logic, so a computer – and these are amazing things, they add up, multiply and remember better than we can – is still very limited. A quantum computer breaches these limits of what a computer can do. It breaks the boundaries and opens up all the things that we want and need to do, but can’t because of the restrictions.

This idea was first thought about in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Three people – Yuri Manin, a mathematician from Russia, Richard Feynman, the American physicist, and David Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford- all came up with the same idea, which is remarkable. It doesn’t often happen in history, you had it with Newton and Leibniz and calculus, but not very often.

By the end of 2013, I got very excited by the thought that, within my lifetime, everything will change. Lives will be dominated by a quantum world. For Cambridge Quantum Computing, I hired all the right people – young people – there was nobody over 28 in the first two years.”

Cambridge Quantum Computing was later merged with Honeywell Quantum Solutions to create Quantinuum, of which Ilyas is Vice-Chair and Chief Product Officer. By applying the laws of quantum physics to computing, they aim to achieve breakthroughs in drug discovery, healthcare, materials science, cybersecurity, energy transformation, and more.

Returning to SOAS to Study Music

Ilyas’ curiosity and intellect are wide-ranging, taking in mathematics, philosophy, literature and music, to name a few of his interests. A chance meeting of his son and an academic led to his return to SOAS as a student after 40 years.

“When I started thinking about a PhD, I had two or three offers. I wanted to do something, which I would enjoy and which would occupy every ounce of my soul, and that’s music. I didn’t know that SOAS could be a part of that; it was a complete accident and why life is wonderful.

My son was thinking about studying Mandarin and came to interview at SOAS. In the interview, he met Ilana Webster-Kogen. Afterwards, I looked her up and realised that she was a musicologist. At the time, I was writing a paper for myself – not for submission – on Eduard Hanslick, a German music critic who had said that music has no intrinsic meaning. I discussed my idea with her and it became my pre-thesis submission, and SOAS made me an offer to do the PhD.

SOAS is in my heart. I’ve never actually left. I’ve got friends at SOAS and I always keep in touch. Continuity is part of who I am. I work on long threads, not on small tomorrows throughout my life: the woman I’ve loved forever, my family and children and my friendships. SOAS fits into that category.”

Ilyas Khan