See Scott Aaronson's blog. It seems like researchers in John Martinis's group at Google might have managed to demonstrate that a quantum computer can produce samples passing a certain statistical test for which we know no efficient classical algorithm to do so. Of course I can't help but posting again the fake nytimes headline I … Continue reading Is quantum supremacy here?

[The following is a guest post by Benny Applebaum announcing a new conference on information theoretic cryptography - an area with both beautiful math and important applications. --Boaz] Deal friends,We are happy to announce the birth of a new conference on Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC). Information-theoretic cryptography studies security in the presence of computationally unbounded adversaries … Continue reading Information-Theoretic Cryptography (ITC) conference (guest post by Benny Applebaum)

[Guest post by David Steurer - seems like a great opportunity! --Boaz] The Swiss Winter School on Lower Bounds and Communication Complexity (10-14 February 2020, https://theory.epfl.ch/WinterSchool2020/ ) is the first in a series of annual winter schools in Theoretical Computer Science jointly organized by EPFL and ETH Zurich. The goal of the school is to … Continue reading Swiss TCS winter school (guest post by David Steurer)

Microsoft Powerpoint has a surprisingly powerful equation editor, which also allows to use latex macros such as \alpha to get $latex \alpha$. I've blogged about the equation editor before but one pet peeve of mine was that I like to have my math in a different color, but never found a way to do this … Continue reading Make equations blue in powerpoint