We already went over |"0"> and |"1"> in the last section, but here I will make three additional comments that will help you read information about quantum computing from other sources:
- This basis is also described as the computational basis, the z basis, or the standard basis, all of which are synonyms for the |"0"> and |"1"> basis. In the next section, we will go over visualizing these states on a sphere and see that |"0"> and |"1"> lie on the z axis. This is where the z basis name comes from. Since |"0"> and |"1"> are the most standard basis choice in quantum computation, this is where the names computational basis and standard basis come from.
- Throughout this book, I keep the qubit name in quotations to make it clear that it's a name, but in other books you'll see people drop the quotations and just write |0> and |1>. For this book, you'll continue to to see me always put the name of the qubit in quotations and use the |"qubit_name"> notation.
- You might also see the | and > parts reversed and written as <"0"| and <"1"|. Under the hood, this means the math the symbols represent changes slightly, but we are not going to need to go into that for now. If you are curious about the mathematics already, see the Appendix for more details.