Benjamin Schumacher

Benjamin Schumacher discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information on a smaller number of states, This is now known as Schumacher compression. This was the quantum analog of Shannon's noiseless coding theorem, and it helped to start the field known as "quantum information theory".

Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit, which is to quantum computation as a bit is to traditional computation.