Remembering Raymond Laflamme, 1960-2025

In 2025, Perimeter remembers a founding faculty member, a remarkable scientist, and a dear friend, Ray Laflamme. Laflamme passed away in June of this year.

He had a knack for making transformative discoveries. Early in his career, Laflamme earned the rare distinction of having changed the mind of renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking. As a bright, industrious student, Laflamme had earned a spot as Hawking’s PhD student at the University of Cambridge in 1984. Hawking was toying with models of the universe in which everything contracts instead of expands, and he believed, in its first iteration, that this model required the direction of time to reverse as well. Laflamme, alongside Canadian physicist Don Page, helped Hawking realize that time must keep ticking on, even in a contracting universe. In Hawking’s words, Laflamme “showed me that the arrow of time is not a boomerang.”

Born in Québec City in 1960, Laflamme would go on to become an institution builder extraordinaire. By 1999, he was high on the list of possible scientists to recruit when Mike Lazaridis set out to create a brand-new institute for theoretical physics in Canada. Laflamme already had a track record of making breakthroughs, and Perimeter Institute was intended to do just that – to make discoveries that would drive the technology of tomorrow.

But Laflamme, who was based at the high-security Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico throughout the 1990s, was not easy to reach. When Perimeter’s first director, Howard Burton, came to call, Laflamme turned him away, fearing he was an FBI agent come to check that Laflamme was not a security risk letting foreign visitors into his lab. Eventually, Burton landed a meeting at a café offsite, where he made his case for Laflamme to join a new institute that was barely more than a name and an idea.

In Waterloo, Laflamme was keenly interested in fostering an ecosystem for collaboration, where theorists and experimentalists could collaborate to advance the field. So when he arrived at Perimeter in 2001, Lazaridis also made him the director of the soon-to-be-opened Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. In the years since, and in no small part due to Laflamme’s guidance, both organizations thrived side by side.

Laflamme truly made his mark in the world of quantum computing. He was early to recognize the potential of quantum mechanics for information science, computing, and even cybersecurity. In New Mexico he had carried out some of the foundational work in the now-burgeoning field of quantum computing, such as developing the Knill-Laflamme-Milburn (KLM) theorem that underpins all modern optical quantum systems.

In 2005, Laflamme was behind an early quantum computing milestone, developing a quantum information processor with 12 qubits – at the time, the world’s largest. Since then, it has been a question of scaling up, and now quantum computing is on the lips of world leaders and innovators across the globe. Computing is no longer the sole focus. Quantum tools for sensing, for communications, and for cybersecurity are all under development.

Laflamme received many awards and recognitions throughout his storied career. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a winner of the CAP-CRM Prize in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, and a recipient of a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. The list goes on.

Perimeter Institute, and the physics community writ large, has lost a dear friend and a brilliant scientist. Raymond Laflamme will be remembered with fondness. He leaves behind an enduring spirit of adventure that all who knew him loved and admired. In his memory, we carry on.