  Accurate prediction of chemical and material properties from first principles
quantum chemistry is a challenging task on traditional computers. Recent
developments in quantum computation offer a route towards highly accurate
solutions with polynomial cost, however this solution still carries a large
overhead. In this perspective, we aim to bring together known results about the
locality of physical interactions from quantum chemistry with ideas from
quantum computation. We show that the utilization of spatial locality combined
with the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation offers an improvement in the scaling of
known quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry and provide numerical examples
to help illustrate this point. We combine these developments to improve the
outlook for the future of quantum chemistry on quantum computers.
