When Cumberland’s Christopher Gilbert knew he solved the quantum computing problem he was working on the summer before his senior year at Greely High School, he ran around telling everyone he could find.

“I was so happy, I ran around telling people ‘I figured it out! I figured it out!’” said Gilbert, 18.

Gilbert figured out the smallest known universal set of quantum gates that use two qubits — the basic unit of quantum information — per operation. This discovery helps address a major challenge in quantum computing, accuracy, by reducing errors that arise when gate systems are too complex. By streamlining the gate set, his project could help make quantum computers more accurate and efficient.

For his scientific discovery, which he refined his senior year, Gilbert won a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute, a program that supports gifted young people. Now in his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gilbert answered some questions about his love of physics and what he is looking forward to working on next.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How’s your first semester at MIT going?

It’s going well! The classes are hard, which is good.

We’ll go back to the beginning. How long have you been interested in quantum computing?

I’ve been interested in physics since before middle school. Actually at the end of sixth grade, I published this book on quantum mechanics for kids, because I just started watching a bunch of YouTube videos and reading books about physics and quantum mechanics, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever and wanted to share it.

I started getting into computer science at the beginning of high school, and when I learned about quantum computing, I was amazed because I was really interested in low-level computer science and also quantum physics, and quantum computing takes advantage of these areas. It was immediately like, ‘Oh, this unites what I love about doing physics and computer science.’ It’s such an amazing subject.

It seems like physics was an early love of yours. What drew you to it and continues to make you excited about it?

I think it’s just because of how counterintuitively the world works. Especially at the super duper small scales, it’s like nothing that you could even comprehend. It’s so far from our intuition, and I just found it amazing that the world works so differently from what we think.

When and how did you make this discovery in quantum computing?

Right after my junior year of high school, I was in a summer computational research program and I got started on the idea of quantum universal sets. I started exploring stuff, building a simulator for them, looking at the math behind it, reading some papers. And eventually I realized that it might be potentially possible to make a smaller universal gate set.

And so that became my single-minded obsession for the rest of my time at that research camp. I was working on it all day, filling whiteboard after whiteboard, trying to figure it out. And eventually, very close to the end, I did figure it out.

It seems like in high school, or even middle school, you were seeking out opportunities to be challenged in physics and computer science. What’s it like being in the MIT environment with so many other people studying similar things at a higher level?

It’s humbled me to some extent. I have definitely met a lot of people who are much better at all of the things that I know. But it’s also so much fun to be able to meet with those people and learn from them.

Doing something in isolation is so much less enjoyable than doing it together with people. It’s really something I hadn’t figured out until the last couple years of high school, was that when you meet with people who know the subjects you love, in depth, it’s so much fun to figure it out, and you make so much more progress. It’s really amazing getting to be at a place like this with so many of those people.

Next semester, I may even get to work on building a quantum computer, which would be very exciting.