Geordie Rose (born January 6, 1972) is a Canadian theoretical physicist and entrepreneur. Since 2018, he has been CEO of Sanctuary in Vancouver, Canada.

Geordie founded D­-Wave, the world’s first quantum computing company, and was the CEO of Kindred, the world’s first robotics company to use reinforcement learning in a production environment. He has sold quantum computers and robots that learn to Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin, The Gap, and several US government agencies. He received a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia in 2000. He is an inventor on 57 granted US patents and a co­-author on a large number of published scientific articles, including two Nature papers, more than a dozen PRLs and PRBs, two NIPS and one ACML paper. He was named the 2011 Canadian Innovator of the Year, was named to Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013, won the 2014 Canadian Technology Leader award, has won two Canadian national wrestling championships and is a member of the McMaster University Hall of Fame, won the 2010 NAGA world championships in Brazilian Jiu­-Jitsu in both gi and no-­gi categories, won the BC provincial A beach volleyball championship with Jason Hall in 2003, for a short time held the Guinness Book of World Records world record for the most yogurt eaten in one minute, was a past holder of British Columbia powerlifting records in deadlift, bench press and total for the 105kg masters division, and has completed eight half marathons and two full marathons.

Recognition

  • Rose's Law

    Coined by Steve Jurvetson, this is the prediction that the number of qubits used in a quantum computation would double every year. This has held now (more or less) for almost twenty years.

  • McMaster Hall of Fame

    In 2009 our 1994 national championship team was inducted into the McMaster Hall of Fame.

  • MIT Tech Review

    Two of my companies have been featured on MIT Tech Review’s list of smartest companies in the world. D-Wave was #40 in 2014, and Kindred was #29 in 2017.

  • Time Magazine

    In 2014 Lev Grossman, who coincidentally wrote one of my favorite books (Codex), wrote a cover piece on D-Wave for Time Magazine.

  • Foreign Policy Magazine

    I was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013 for “pioneering the development of quantum computers”.

  • Harvard Business School

    In 2004 an HBS case study on D-Wave was written by Alan MacCormack, Rebecca Henderson and Ajay Agrawal.