When I taught my crypto course in the spring of 2016, I motivated the study of lattice-based cryptography by presenting the following spoofed NYTimes headline from four years into the future: It seems like Google is trying to achieve this much earlier: If and when a convincing "quantum supremacy" demonstration emerges, it would be … Continue reading Two years ahead of schedule?
A Social Blogger
Since the close of MSR-SVC, I seem to have lost my taste for blogging. I think I finally know why: For me blogging is a social activity. I loved discussing the posts with my down-the-hall colleagues and friends. So, to regain this wonderful feeling, we (Stanford Theory) are opening a new theory group blog - … Continue reading A Social Blogger
TOCA-SV: May 12
Our second TOCA-SV meeting will take place at Google, Mountain View, on Friday May 12. We had a very good first meeting, and we are hoping to continue the momentum. Please come and register.
TheoryFest update
[Guest post by Sanjeev Arora. Action items: register, book your hotel and flight, and consider submitting a poster.] ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing Is morphing this year into a 5-day Theory Fest, as announced earlier. This is going to be a new and exciting kind of event for the theory community, with talks covering a … Continue reading TheoryFest update
Celebrating TCS at STOC 2017
STOC 2017 is going to be part of an expanded “Theory Festival” which will include not just the paper presentations, but a host of other activities such as plenary talks and tutorials, workshops, and more. One of the components I am most excited about is a sequence of invited plenary short talks where we will … Continue reading Celebrating TCS at STOC 2017
Why I dislike TeX (a pre-deadline rant)
TeX and LaTeX are in many ways, amazing pieces of software. Their contribution to improving and enabling scientific communication cannot be questioned, and I have been a (mostly) grateful user. But sometimes even grateful users have to rant a bit.. My main issue with TeX is that, at its heart, it is a programming language. … Continue reading Why I dislike TeX (a pre-deadline rant)
On “external” definitions for computation
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating talk by the physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed on the The Morality of Fundamental Physics. ("Moral" here is in the sense of "morally correct", as opposed to understanding the impact of science on society. Perhaps "beauty" would have been a better term.) In this talk, Arkani-Hamed describes the quest for finding scientific theories … Continue reading On “external” definitions for computation
The immigration ban is still antithetical to scientific progress
By Boaz Barak and Omer Reingold President Trump had just signed a new executive order revising the prior ban on visitors from seven (now six) muslim-majority countries. It is fundamentally the same, imposing a blanket 90-day ban on entry of people from six countries, with the conditions for lifting the ban depending on the cooperation of these … Continue reading The immigration ban is still antithetical to scientific progress
Immigration ban is antithetical to scientific progress
By Boaz Barak and Omer Reingold Update (1/28): If you are an academic that opposes this action, please consider signing the following open letter. Today leaked drafts of planned executive actions showed that president Trump apparently intends to issue an order suspending (and possibly permanently banning) entry to the U.S. of citizens of seven countries: Iran, … Continue reading Immigration ban is antithetical to scientific progress
On exp(exp(sqrt(log n))) algorithms.
Update: I made a bit of a mess in my original description of the technical details, which was based on my faulty memory from Laci's talk a year ago at Harvard. See Laci's and Harald's posts for more technical information. Laci Babai has posted an update on his graph isomorphism algorithm. While preparing a Bourbaki … Continue reading On exp(exp(sqrt(log n))) algorithms.
Windows On Theory 