Ilyas Tariq Khan

Ilyas Khan graduated from SOAS University of London with a BA hons in South Asian Studies (class of 1983). He then started a career that led him to eventually be a founder of two companies, the most recent being Quantinuum, a quantum computing company that was created within the Accelerate Cambridge programme, and was recently valued at over US$10billion, and is one of the most successful deep tech companies founded in the UK.

Ilyas was a fellow of St Edmund’s college Cambridge for over 12 years, and a fellow of the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School for just over 13 years. At the Judge Ilyas also taught and co-taught an elective on Ethics to the Mphil cohort for 3 years.  Ilyas has written books and published papers on a variety of topics. He is the co-author of papers on Quantum Computing, Category theory, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Symbolism. He has delivered lectures and talks on topics around Quantum Computing in universities around the world, and is also a published author for a book about his experience as an entrepreneur and also a book about the improbability of String Theory. He has presented at a variety of conferences.  

His research topic at SOAS relates to Music, and in particular the long-standing question of whether music has any intrinsic meaning, leading from the well known work of Eduard Hanslick in the 19th century.  Ilyas has a long-standing interest in open-access academic publication and has supported a number new journals to be launched where academic excellence is not compromised and where the current system of academic published can be challenged.  Prior to founding Ilyas was also involved in a project to secure open access rights for the Nachlass of Wittgenstein. 

This project, in partnership with the University of Bergen, has led to the expansion of Wittgenstein’s work on a geographically and academically diverse group. His interest in Wittgenstein also includes papers published around the topic of Wittgenstein’s work as a philosopher of Mathematics and lectures and talks on this subject.  Most recently Ilyas has also jointly acquired the outstanding papers of the important mathematician Alexander Grothendieck who is widely recognised as the most important mathematician of the 20th century and one of the most important mathematicians ever to have lived. This sizeable nachlass will be prepared for public access, revolutionising academic research in this important figure. 

A Compositional Model of Consciousness Based on Consciousness-Only

Towards Compositional Interpretability for XAI

Ilyas's research interest(s) revolve around musicology as it relates to the question of whether or not Music has meaning at any intrinsic level. Related to this Ilyas is also interested in the Philosophy of Aesthetics. From an ethnomusicology standpoint he is also interested in Jazz (particularly John Coltrane) and Sufi Music (especially Nusrat Fateh Ali)

Quantinuum.com