Congratulations to Johan Håstad for winning the 2018 Knuth prize! Johan of course has done groundbreaking works from constructing pseudorandom generators based on one way functions, through his famous switching lemma, to his PCP theorem that continues to this day to be the blueprint for much of the work in hardness of approximation. A most deserving … Continue reading Johan Håstad wins Knuth prize

At the recommendation of Craig Gentry, I recently read the book "Factor Man" by Matt Ginsberg. This book is about a computer scientist that discovers an efficient algorithm for SAT, which starts off a international game of intrigue involving the FBI, NSA, Chinese spies, Swiss banks, and even some characters we know such as Steven … Continue reading Book Review: “Factor Man”

[Unrelated note: Huge congratulations to Costis Daskalakis - winner of the 2018 Nevanlinna medal!] As part of the CRYPTO 2018 conference (August 19-23, Santa Barbara, CA), there is a set of of affiliated events. The conference organizers (Tal Rabin, Elette Boyle, and Fabrice Benhamouda)  asked me  to advertise the workshop Beyond Crypto: A TCS Perspective (itself organized … Continue reading Beyond CRYPTO workshop: August 19

I just came back from a wonderful TheoryFest in LA. There was a fantastic program,  including not just the paper presentations, but also tutorials, keynote talks, plenary short papers, and workshops, as well as other events including the junior/senior lunches, STOC 50th birthday, and probably others that I am forgetting right now. Still, while we … Continue reading Theoryfest recap and FOCS call for workshops

We had last week the "Women In Theory" workshop at Harvard. Thanks to the efforts of the organizers  Tal Rabin, Shubhangi Saraf, and Lisa Zhang, as well as the hard work of our staff at Harvard, it was (in my opinion) a huge success. But there is still so much more to be done. A … Continue reading Women in theory (and CS in general)

It's that time of the year again, where you can see TheoryFest decorations in every home,  and TheoryFest music is playing in shops and on the radio. For those making the pilgrimage to Los Angeles, I hope to see you there. There are many great papers, workshops, and other content in the program, but I … Continue reading Celebrating TheoryFest

By Boaz Barak and Jarosław Błasiok [Jarek gave a great informal exposition of this paper on Friday, and I asked him to make it into a blog post. My only knowledge of the paper is from Jarek's explanations: my main contribution to this post was to delete some details and insert some inaccuracies --Boaz.]   A … Continue reading On the Raz-Tal oracle separation of BQP and PH

A couple of years ago I posted about Theory Life Hacks. "Life" might be a bit too grand, but what I really mean are technological tools that can help in the day to day work. In the last two years, perhaps because of taking more responsibilities, I found myself using more technology and so I … Continue reading Theory Life-Hacks II

This spring I taught Cryptography at Harvard (as usual my lecture notes are online ). Teaching it was a great fun because of the fantastic group of students that took the course.  They were genuinely interested in cryptography, and kept asking me extremely interesting questions and had excellent insights. Thanks also to Yael Kalai and … Continue reading Cryptography course projects