(If you're not already following him, I highly recommend reading Luca Trevisan's dispatches from Milan, much more interesting than what I write below.) On the topic of my last post, Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times that "In the fog of coronavirus, there are no experts", even citing Scott Aaronson's post. Both Aaronson … Continue reading Experts shmexperts

Scott Aaronson blogged in defense of "armchair epidemiology". Scott makes several points I agree with, but he also advocates that rather than discounting ideas from "contrarians" who have no special expertise in the matter, each one of us should evaluate the input of such people on its merits. I disagree. I can judge on their … Continue reading In defense of expertise

The new coronavirus upended much of society, including our little corner of it. I believe at this point almost all theorists are teaching and doing research at home, and I thought it would be good to share some of the tools we use for doing so. Below I will describe my setup, but I hope … Continue reading Technology for theory: COVID-19 edition

Shcachar Lovett has put together a new website aggregating information about virtual talks in CS theory: https://cstheorytalks.wordpress.com/  It has a Google calendar that people can add to their own, and a form to submit a new talk that automatically gets added to the Google calendar.  This can be a fantastic resource these days that almost … Continue reading New CS theory talk aggragator

From Sandy Irani, FOCS 2020 PC chair: In light of the very unusual developments in the world due to the spread of Covid-19 and the disruption it is causing to many people in our field, especially those with young children at home, the FOCS PC has decided to push back the final deadline for papers … Continue reading FOCS deadline pushed back 6 days

Harvard University, as well most other places that I know of will be moving to remote lectures. I just gave the last in-person lecture in my cryptography course. I would appreciate technical suggestions on the best format for teaching remotely. At the moment I plan to use Zoom and log-in from both my laptop (for … Continue reading Life and CS theory in the age of Coronavirus

This semester I taught another iteration of my "Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science" course, based on my textbook in process. The book was also used in University of Virgnia CS 3102 by David Evans and Nathan Brunelle. The main differences I made in the text and course since its original version were to make it … Continue reading Intro TCS recap

In an exciting manuscript just posted on the arxiv, Zhengfeng Ji, Anand Natarajan, Thomas Vidick, John Wright, and Henry Yuen prove that there is a 2-prover quantum protocol (with shared entanglement) for the halting problem. As a consequence they resolve negatively a host of open problems in quantum information theory and operator algebra, including refuting … Continue reading MIP*=RE, disproving Connes embedding conjecture.

I am in Tel Aviv Theory Fest this week - a fantastic collection of talks and workshops organized by Yuval Filmus , Gil Kalai, Ronen Eldan, and Muli Safra. It was a good chance to catch up with many friends and colleagues. In particular I met Elchanan Mossel and Subhash Khot, who asked me to … Continue reading A bet for the new decade

[The post below is by Dorit Aharonov who co-organized the wonderful school on quantum computing last week which I attended and greatly enjoyed. --Boaz] TL;DR: Last week we had a wonderful one-week intro course into the math of quantum computing at Hebrew U;  It included a one day crash course on the basics, and 7 mini-courses on math-oriented research … Continue reading A crash course on the math of quantum computing (guest post by Dorit Aharonov)