The submission server for #ITCS2026 (which will take place at Bocconi University, Milan, in January 2026) is open! Submission deadline: Sep 4 (abstracts), Sep 6 (papers) itcs-conf.org

How fast can (pseudo)random unitaries be implemented on a quantum computer? O(1) time suffices (provided you can do things like intermediate measurements)! This -and more- is thanks to a superfun collaboration with Ben Foxman, @nat-parham.bsky.social, and @franvasco.bsky.social (all PhD students!).

Donation link here: www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/nsf-fun...

the scenario we all feared

Come for the iconic papers and eye-wateringly beautiful textbooks, stay for the stories "from the trenches" (of which I hope John posts more of!). Keep writing, @johnwatrous.bsky.social !

Out today in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: a new path toward building quantum cryptography on much harder problems than the ones used for classical encryption. Fascinating stuff!

From our very thoughtful law school colleague, David Pozen, a first take on the Columbia deal. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

One of the great joys of 2025 (so far) has been learning about nonlocal quantum computation. It's an astonishingly interesting playground of ideas. In this fun collaboration with @hippoquantus.bsky.social, Simon, Alex, Mikka, and Philip, we uncover some hidden structure in this playground.

As seen in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Peter Carr was a great mathematician with an expertise in finance. I had the honor of being a colleague of his at Cornell before he moved to NYU, where he became a legendary teacher and a professor, much beloved.

The first rule of the One-Way Communication Complexity club is that Bob doesn't talk about the One-Way Communication Complexity club

Space and time are the most fundamental resources in computation, and researchers have long sought to understand how they’re related. A recent breakthrough by Ryan Williams marks the first progress on that question in 50 years. Read more in @quantamagazine.bsky.social!

First there was MATH POPE Then there was MATH PRESIDENT

On Friday I made my first-ever calls to congress to oppose funding cuts to NSF. It was super easy — it took just a couple minutes, and I read off a script provided by Save NSF (www.savensf.com). Afterwards, I felt good. The pervasive sense of powerlessness was held at bay, at least temporarily.(1/8)

New: We have the list of ~190 Harvard NSF grant terminations from internal agency sources. About $148 million intended funds killed. Over 1/3 are from the MPS directorate—roughly 75 math and physics grants.

Greg Hager talks about why he left the NSF. cra.org/a-letter-to-...

Accepted papers at TQC 2025. tqc-conference.org/accepted-tal.... Many interesting-looking titles!

Prakash Murali and I are seeking to jointly recruit a postdoctoral researcher (Dowling postdoctoral fellow) at Cambridge focused on quantum algorithms, complexity, error correction, and architecture. Further details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50485/ Deadline: 7 April 2025

Natalie @nat-parham.bsky.social has some bold new ways of proving quantum circuit lower bounds, with fascinating connections to condensed matter physics and the natural proofs barrier from complexity theory. There are some really interesting questions to explore here.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Some entertaining myth-making (from mathoverflow.net/a/491227/121...):

This past week, I received a second stop work order on one of my grants. This now means that we can no longer spend on *two* of my major grants. Several of my group members will now graduate earlier than expected, I am looking into being a consultant for the summer, and students will do internships

This is really unfortunate to hear, Mark.

Congratulations, Jeongwan Haah, recipient of the New Horizons in Physics Prize "for the discovery of Haah's code, in which fractal conservation laws emerge, and other models bringing discrete mathematical structures to physics"! breakthroughprize.org/News/91

Well done Princeton!

NY Theory Day is returning on Friday April 11 at Columbia! It's free to attend but you have to register on the website by April 4. We have a great speaker lineup: Rachel Cummings (Columbia) Bill Kuszmaul (CMU) Nick Spooner (Cornell) Ryan Williams (MIT) sites.google.com/view/nyctheo...

Today I'm filled with admiration for my university's president, Chris Eisgruber. He's standing up for Columbia and for universities as a home for freedom of ideas, debate, and thought - free of government attack. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

A statement by five faculty members in the political science department at Columbia in response to the demands made by the Trump administration: danieldrezner.substack.com/p/guest-post.... The pointed ending resonates.

UBC physics is hiring up to two assistant professors in quantum information. Looks like an excellent opportunity---great department, great city, etc. phas.ubc.ca/open-positio...

Good news for the new year: if you want a more streamlined proof of the landmark result MIP* = RE, then a new paper does that (and much more): arxiv.org/abs/2501.00173 (207 pages, though)

Great timeline of quantum supremacy claims and refutations by Tom Wong on X. x.com/thomasgwong/...

I'm hiring a postdoc to work with me at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign! For details and how to apply, visit felixleditzky.info/postdoc2024.... Applications received by January 10 (AoE) will receive full consideration. Please share!

I might be the last horse to cross the finish line here, but I learned today that the length "1em" in tex doesn't stand for anything, rather, it's called that because it's exactly the length of one uppercase M 🤯

Very excited that our work was featured on @tomgur.bsky.social's 2024 advent calendar, alongside many great math/TCS talks from the year! 😊

List of accepted talks for #QIP2025 rsvp.duke.edu/event/qip202...

This is epic.

This was a fun project to work on -- thanks to @jiahuiliu.bsky.social and my student Saachi for a great collaboration. An alternate title of the paper could've been: "Aaronson, Ambainis, and Kuperberg all walk into a bar..". (1/4)

We would like to use this opportunity to get @johnwatrous.bsky.social reaction to this tweet.

One of my favorite things is staring at the numerical solution of an SDP, guessing an analytical ansatz, and then showing that it's optimal using SDP duality. It's just so satisfying to turn some numerical solution into an actual clean solution.

Natalie Parham, a PhD student who I am proud to be an advisor to, is one of the recipients of the Google PhD Fellowships in Quantum Computing. Congrats Natalie! Here's a nice Q&A with her: quantum.columbia.edu/news/identif.... Be on the lookout for what she does next.

Greetings new followers! Keep in mind that most stars that will ever be born already have been; the last red dwarf will exhaust its fuel in 10^15 years; and the last black hole will evaporate in 10^100 years. After that, nothing but cold, desolate, empty space, for all eternity.

This week's NOVA is Decoding the Universe: Quantum. I am one of the talking heads! I think physicists are going to struggle talking about quantum mechanics as long as we think of the quantum state - not our observational outcomes - as representing what is real. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t06a...

NYU has a lot of CS faculty and postdoc positions this year. Here's all that I know of: Faculty: Courant CS: apply.interfolio.com/157060 @nyutandon.bsky.social CSE: apply.interfolio.com/156275 AI: apply.interfolio.com/157569 Quantum: apply.interfolio.com/158835 (Postdocs in next post) 1/3

I was today years old when I got it

Why limit this to humanities? I envision "Taylor Swift and Modular Forms" might increase undergraduate interest in number theory by 1000x.

The videos from the SLMath/MSRI workshop on MIP* = RE are up: www.slmath.org/workshops/98.... It was extremely engaging, thanks to the enthusiastic participants. People weren't afraid to ask basic questions, everyone was curious, and the location was transcendent.

I'm excited about this result of Alex, Fermi, and John: arxiv.org/abs/2310.08870. They make nontrivial progress on Unitary Synthesis Question of Aaronson and Kuperberg. TLDR: can implementing a unitary, a "fully quantum" task, be efficiently reduced to computing boolean functions?

I am looking forward to this week's MSRI workshop on MIP* = RE (www.slmath.org/workshops/987), organized by Michael Chapman, Anand Natarajan, William Slofstra, John Wright, and me. The goal: catalyze new directions in quantum info, TCS, and pure math. Zoom registration still open!

Alright, let's start again — who's doing Theory (of Computer Science) or talking math around here? I'd like to follow more people.