73. Year 0–1 — Foundations

Theme: the mathematics becomes native, the circuit model becomes reflex, and your first serious artifacts exist in public.

Mathematics (months 0–4): Parts III in full — linear algebra to the eigendecomposition, complex numbers to comfort, probability to distributions-over-amplitudes. Working method: every concept instantiated at n=2 in numpy; the Ch. 52.5 discipline from day one. Milestone check: you can compute a tensor product, check unitarity, and diagonalize a Hamiltonian without notes.

Quantum information (months 3–6): Parts II, IV, V — postulates, qubits, entanglement, the measurement statistics that make everything else sensible. You are not learning philosophy; you are building the object model in your head (Ch. 2.18–2.21's thinking modes).

Qiskit (months 4–6): Part VI's chapters 15–16 — circuit construction, transpilation, simulators, the debugging and testing discipline. By month 6, the Ch. 16.15 test-first workflow is your default.

Algorithms (months 6–9): Part VII — every algorithm implemented by hand on your simulator as you read; Project 2's early milestones run concurrently.

Simulation (months 9–12): Chapter 17, executed as Project 1 — your quantum simulator, built, benchmarked, tested against Aer, public.

Deliverable: 3–5 serious GitHub projects. By month 12: the simulator (Project 1), the algorithm laboratory (Project 2, at least M1–M4), the noisy simulator (Project 3) begun or complete, plus two smaller public artifacts (reproducible notebooks, blog posts with code). All at Ch. 62.1's standards: they run, they're tested, they're documented. Year-1 exit self-audit: Ch. 59.8's first boxes ticked — can you read a paper's circuit (Ch. 52)? Can you debug someone's quantum code? Can you predict distributions before running? If yes, the foundation holds.