Warm congratulations to Ilias, Gautam, Daniel, Jerry, Ankur, and Alistair!

This is a great blog post about making academic talks (and where AI should or should not come into the picture).

The TheoryFest workshops at #STOC2026 have been announced! Including one on Property Testing, by Anindya De and @shivamnadimpalli.bsky.social ! acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/wor...

Out today in @quantamagazine.bsky.social — my latest dispatch from the very meta, mind-bending corners of CS theory research. It's about a new approach to cryptography in which secrecy stems from Gödel-esque unprovable statements!

Sidhanth Mohanty now has a blog! sidhanthm.com/bubbles/john...

In this MURI project with Sebastian Will (Columbia), Yongshan Ding (Yale), Shruti Puri (Yale), and Daniel Grier (UCSD), we will explore the potential uses and benefits (and limitations!) of using quantum gates that can act on many qubits at a time.

FOCS 2026 will be held in New York City Nov 8 - 11! CFP is up (link below). Submit your best work in theoretical computer science by April 1, 5pm ET.

Congrats to Sloan fellows: @nyucourant.bsky.social colleagues Florian Schäfer and Joe Tassarotti, and theory colleagues @behnezhad.bsky.social, @surbhigoel.bsky.social, Aayush Jain, Anand Natarajan, @adtraghunathan.bsky.social, @soledadvillar.bsky.social, and John Wright! sloan.org/fellowships/...

I discuss fully quantum complexity theory with @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social. Although we're not really sure, it seems like our understanding of computing on quantum data needs new foundations. Transforming quantum data is less like solving a hard math problem, and more like doing an intricate dance.

How to turn off Gmail's ability to read your emails to train its bots: www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

My student @johnbostanci.bsky.social, Chinmay Nirkhe, Jonas Haferkamp, and Mark Zhandry have put out a tour-de-force paper that shows, relative to a classical oracle, QMA is stronger than QCMA -- i.e., quantum proofs >> classical proofs. Congratulations to the authors! arxiv.org/abs/2511.09551

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...

You could also work with Debbie Leung, Richard Cleve, David Gosset, Luke Schaefer, Ashwin Nayak, Norbert Lutkenhaus, Mike Mosca, Christine Muschik or some combination of us if you do theory.

I do phase estimation without QFT in my undergrad course. youtu.be/CMqPutlG59c?... It's just Hadamard test plus binary search.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Tomorrow I am teaching quantum phase estimation in my Intro to Quantum Computing Class for the seventh time. I was prepared to teach it the standard, textbook, Nielsen and Chuang way: applied controlled unitaries and their powers thereof, apply inverse QFT to the ancillas.

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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! 😊