Was it David Deutsch? Can you say who was the first paper to mention the phase kickback trick?
2 Answers
The phase kickback trick appears in this paper:
Richard Cleve, Artur Ekert, Chiara Macchiavello, Michele Mosca. Quantum Algorithms Revisited. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, 454(1969): 339-354, 1998.
The authors credit Alain Tapp for independently discovering the same improvement to Deutsch's algorithm that results from using this trick. (Deutsch's original algorithm, which did not make use of the phase kickback trick, was in fact not deterministic; the algorithm we now typically call Deutsch's algorithm is actually the improved version proposed in the above paper.)
As to "who discovered/invented the quantum phase estimation algorithm," in his 2011 lecture at Keio University describing the linear equations algorithm, at about the 18 minute mark Lloyd claims that it was inherent in the works of Von Neumann.
That reminds me of the argument that "Gauss discovered the Fast Fourier Transform 160 years before Cooley and Tukey."