Solving one of the most basic and mysterious questions in quantum computing, freshly graduated doctoral mathematics student Urmila Mahadev developed what her academic adviser, electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Umesh Vazirani, calls a "very beautiful Ph.D. dissertation." In Paris this past weekend, she presented her work at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, winning their prestigious "best paper" and "best student paper" prizes. The question her independent work answered -- how you can verify that a quantum computer has made a calculation correctly and if it's even done anything quantum -- is critical to the future of quantum computers, and could tremendously speed progress on a number of problems, including the modeling of behavior around black holes and the simulation of large protein folding. Her obsession with solving the problem, which she encountered two years into her program, kept her in school years beyond the normal graduation date – eight years all told. Now she's continuing at Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher.