Sheikha Mayassa's job, as the head of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), was to turn Qatar into a cultural powerhouse—a wellspring for exploring what art is and what it means for human beings to create it.
Mr Hirst's show at Tate Modern in London, which opens on April 4th and which is costing the QMA more than £2m to sponsor, will give rise next year to a Hirst show in Qatar, another first for the region.
In computational complexity theory, QMA, which stands for Quantum Merlin Arthur, is the quantum analog of the nonprobabilistic complexity class NP or the probabilistic complexity class MA. It is related to BQP in the same way NP is related to P, or MA is related to BPP.