QOSF and the Unitary Fund Announce the Winner of the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source So...

The Quantum Open Source Foundation (QOSF) and the Unitary Fund have announced Victory Omole, a software engineer at Super.tech, as the winner of the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software for his outstanding contributions to Cirq and other open-source projects. He was selected after review of 38 nominations from all over the world. Three runners up were also announced including (in no particular order) Kesha Hietala who led the design of the SQIR quantum programming language, Paul Nation who co-created QuTiP and Robert Smith who started the Quil ecosystem and open-sourced large parts of the Rigetti software stack. The Wittek prize is a yearly award that was established in 2020 in memory of Peter Wittek, a pioneer in the field of open quantum software who went missing on a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas in 2019. The prize award is $4,000 with the intent to reward an otherwise unnoticed individual for outstanding contribution to the field of quantum open-source software. For more information about the Wittek Quantum Prize, you can view the website for it here. And for more about the selection of Victory Omole as the winner of the 2021 prize, you can view a Medium article and associated video here.

January 21, 2022