Andreas Winter was born in Altötting, a small rural town near Munich, known also as the Heart of Bavaria. After developing an infatuation with science early on, and in particular with mathematics, he decided to study this subject in Konstanz and Berlin. He graduated in 1997 from the Freie Universität Berlin, and went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Universität Bielefeld in 1999, with the late Rudolf Ahlswede. In 2001 he joined the quantum information group in Bristol as a postdoc, became Lecturer in Applied Mathematics there in 2003, and Professor of the Physics of Information in 2006. In 2012 he left Bristol after 11 years, to move to the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona as ICREA Research Professor, where he was part of the quantum information group. Since April 2025 he is on leave as Humboldt Professor of Quantum Information and Computation at the Universität zu Köln, Germany.
Research interests
I work on quantum information, especially quantum Shannon theory, which aims at incorporating information-theoretic ideas into physics. The Shannon theoretic approach has succeeded in quantifying entanglement as a resource in information processing task, and likewise for other properties of quantum systems such as channel and storage capacities of quantum systems. One of my favourite topics is the interplay between classical and quantum information, evident in the intricate structure of local operations in composite systems, such as data hiding or "information locking". I also work on additivity and non-additivity of quantum channel capacities, quantum data compression, and zero-error quantum communication. Further interests include statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, resource theories, entropy characterization and entanglement measures. But at heart I am a mathematician and will still get fascinated by classic problems: existence of Hadamard matrices, incompleteness, ...
Selected publications
- Piccolini M, Karczewski M, Winter A & Lo Franco R 2025, 'Robust generation of N-partite N-level singlet states by identical particle interferometry', Quantum Sci. Technol., vol. 10, art. 015013.
- Winter A, Nachtergaele B, Christandl M, Hiai F, Smith G, Warzel S 2025 'Special issue honouring Mary Beth Ruskai', Lett. Math. Phys., vol. 115, art. 1.
- Aniello P, L'Innocente S, Mancini S, Parisi V, Svampa I & Winter A 2025 'Characterising the Haar measure on the p-adic rotation groups via inverse limits of measure spaces', Expositiones mathematicae, vol. 43, no. 2, art. 125592.
- Salek F & Winter A 2025 'New Protocols for Conference Key and Multipartite Entanglement Distillation', IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 71, no. 6, pp. 4374-4384.
- Colomer P, Deppe C, Boche H & Winter A 2025 'Rate-Reliability Tradeoff for Deterministic Identification', Proc. IEEE ICC 2025, pp. 2845-2850.
- Colomer P, Deppe C, Boche H & Winter A 2025 'Quantum Hypothesis Testing Lemma for Deterministic Identification over Quantum Channels', Proc. IEEE ISIT 2025, pp. 1-5.
- Althöfer I, Boche H, Deppe C, Tamm U, Winter A & Yeung R W 2025 'Ning Cai: A Tribute to a Pioneering Scholar in Information Theory', in: Information Theory and Related Fields: Essays in Memory of Ning Cai, Springer LNCS 14620, pp. 505-523.
- Colomer P, Deppe C, Boche H & Winter A 2025 'Zero-entropy encoders and simultaneous decoders in identification via quantum channels', in: Information Theory and Related Fields: Essays in Memory of Ning Cai, Springer LNCS 14620, pp. 478-502.
Selected research activities
Thanks to my Humboldt Research Prize and the TUM IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship, I could lead the organisation of the 13th Beyond IID in Information Theory at the Institute of Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, 14-18 July 2025. It brought together almost 130 leading experts of classical and quantum information theory working on current problems of one-shot information, entropies and coding theory.