Scott Aaronson

Last updated

Scott Aaronson
Scott Aaronson retouched.jpg
Aaronson in 2011
Born
Scott Joel Aaronson

(1981-05-21) May 21, 1981 (age 43)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Nationality American
Alma mater
Known for
Spouse Dana Moshkovitz
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Computational complexity theory, quantum computing
Institutions
Doctoral advisor Umesh Vazirani
Website scottaaronson.blog , www.scottaaronson.com

Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) [1] is an American theoretical computer scientist and Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are computational complexity theory and quantum computing.

Contents

Personal life

Aaronson is married to computer scientist Dana Moshkovitz. [2] Aaronson identifies as Jewish. [3] [4] [5]

Early life and education

Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father—a science writer turned public-relations executive—was posted to Hong Kong. [6] He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers. He enrolled in The Clarkson School, a gifted education program run by Clarkson University, which enabled Aaronson to apply for colleges while only in his freshman year of high school. [6] He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, [7] and where he resided at the Telluride House. [8] He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. [9]

Aaronson had shown ability in mathematics from an early age, teaching himself calculus at the age of 11, provoked by symbols in a babysitter's textbook. He discovered computer programming at age 11, and felt he lagged behind peers, who had already been coding for years. In part due to Aaronson getting into advanced mathematics before getting into computer programming, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity theory. At Cornell, he became interested in quantum computing and devoted himself to computational complexity and quantum computing. [6]

Career

After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. [7] His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.

In the summer of 2016 he moved from MIT to the University of Texas at Austin as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science and as the founding director of UT Austin's new Quantum Information Center. [2] In summer 2022 he announced he would be working for a year at OpenAI on theoretical foundations of AI safety. [10] [11]

Awards

He is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity. [22] [23] He is the author of the blog "Shtetl-Optimized". [24]

In the interview to Scientific American he answers why his blog is called shtetl-optimized, and about his preoccupation to the past:

Shtetls were Jewish villages in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. They're where all my ancestors came from—some actually from the same place (Vitebsk) as Marc Chagall, who painted the fiddler on the roof. I watched Fiddler many times as a kid, both the movie and the play. And every time, there was a jolt of recognition, like: "So that's the world I was designed to inhabit. All the aspects of my personality that mark me out as weird today, the obsessive reading and the literal-mindedness and even the rocking back and forth—I probably have them because back then they would've made me a better Talmud scholar, or something."

— Scott Aaronson [25]

He also wrote the essay "Who Can Name The Bigger Number?". [26] The latter work, widely distributed in academic computer science, uses the concept of Busy Beaver Numbers as described by Tibor Radó to illustrate the limits of computability in a pedagogic environment.

He has also taught a graduate-level survey course, "Quantum Computing Since Democritus", [27] for which notes are available online, and have been published as a book by Cambridge University Press. [28] It weaves together disparate topics into a cohesive whole, including quantum mechanics, complexity, free will, time travel, the anthropic principle and more. Many of these interdisciplinary applications of computational complexity were later fleshed out in his article, "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity". [29] Since then, Aaronson published a book entitled Quantum Computing Since Democritus based on the course.

An article of Aaronson's, "The Limits of Quantum Computers", was published in Scientific American , [30] and he was a guest speaker at the 2007 Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference. [31] Aaronson is frequently cited in the non-academic press, such as Science News, [32] The Age, [33] ZDNet, [34] Slashdot, [35] New Scientist, [36] The New York Times, [37] and Forbes magazine. [38]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum computing</span> Technology that uses quantum mechanics

A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of both particles and waves, and quantum computing leverages this behavior using specialized hardware. Classical physics cannot explain the operation of these quantum devices, and a scalable quantum computer could perform some calculations exponentially faster than any modern "classical" computer. In particular, a large-scale quantum computer could break widely used encryption schemes and aid physicists in performing physical simulations; however, the current state of the art is largely experimental and impractical, with several obstacles to useful applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael O. Rabin</span> Israeli mathematician and computer scientist (born 1931)

Michael Oser Rabin is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard M. Karp</span> American mathematician

Richard Manning Karp is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing Award in 1985, The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science in 2004, and the Kyoto Prize in 2008.

Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation.

Johan Torkel Håstad is a Swedish theoretical computer scientist most known for his work on computational complexity theory. He was the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1994 and 2011 and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1986, among other prizes. He has been a professor in theoretical computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden since 1988, becoming a full professor in 1992. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Sipser</span> American theoretical computer scientist (born 1954)

Michael Fredric Sipser is an American theoretical computer scientist who has made early contributions to computational complexity theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics and was the dean of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mario Szegedy</span>

Mario Szegedy is a Hungarian-American computer scientist, professor of computer science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Chicago after completing his dissertation titled Algebraic Methods in Lower Bounds for Computational Models. He held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1989–90), a postdoc at the University of Chicago, 1991–92, and a postdoc at Bell Laboratories (1992).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knuth Prize</span> Prize given by ACM and IEEE for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science

The Donald E. Knuth Prize is a prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science, named after the American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth.

Umesh Virkumar Vazirani is an Indian–American academic who is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. His research interests lie primarily in quantum computing. He is also a co-author of a textbook on algorithms.

Bruce Howard McCormick (1928–2007) was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University.

In quantum computing, the threshold theorem states that a quantum computer with a physical error rate below a certain threshold can, through application of quantum error correction schemes, suppress the logical error rate to arbitrarily low levels. This shows that quantum computers can be made fault-tolerant, as an analogue to von Neumann's threshold theorem for classical computation. This result was proven by the groups of Dorit Aharanov and Michael Ben-Or; Emanuel Knill, Raymond Laflamme, and Wojciech Zurek; and Alexei Kitaev independently. These results built on a paper of Peter Shor, which proved a weaker version of the threshold theorem.

The philosophy of computer science is concerned with the philosophical questions that arise within the study of computer science. There is still no common understanding of the content, aims, focus, or topics of the philosophy of computer science, despite some attempts to develop a philosophy of computer science like the philosophy of physics or the philosophy of mathematics. Due to the abstract nature of computer programs and the technological ambitions of computer science, many of the conceptual questions of the philosophy of computer science are also comparable to the philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of technology.

Lance Jeremy Fortnow is a computer scientist known for major results in computational complexity and interactive proof systems. He is the Dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Constantinos Daskalakis</span> Greek computer scientist

Constantinos Daskalakis is a Greek theoretical computer scientist. He is a professor at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize and the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan Williams (computer scientist)</span> Computer scientist

Richard Ryan Williams, known as Ryan Williams, is an American theoretical computer scientist working in computational complexity theory and algorithms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Wiesner</span> Israeli research physicist (1942–2021)

Stephen J. Wiesner was an American-Israeli research physicist, inventor and construction laborer. As a graduate student at Columbia University in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he discovered several of the most important ideas in quantum information theory, including quantum money, quantum multiplexing and superdense coding. Although this work remained unpublished for over a decade, it circulated widely enough in manuscript form to stimulate the emergence of quantum information science in the 1980s and 1990s.

D-Wave Two is the second commercially available quantum computer, and the successor to the first commercially available quantum computer, D-Wave One. Both computers were developed by Canadian company D-Wave Systems. The computers are not general purpose, but rather are designed for quantum annealing. Specifically, the computers are designed to use quantum annealing to solve a single type of problem known as quadratic unconstrained binary optimization. As of 2015, it was still debated whether large-scale entanglement takes place in D-Wave Two, and whether current or future generations of D-Wave computers will have any advantage over classical computers.

<i>Quantum Computing Since Democritus</i> Book by Scott Aaronson

Quantum Computing Since Democritus is a 2013 book on quantum information science written by Scott Aaronson. It is loosely based on a course Aaronson taught at the University of Waterloo, Canada, the lecture notes for which are available online.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Igor L. Markov</span> American computer scientist and engineer

Igor Leonidovich Markov is an American professor, computer scientist and engineer. Markov is known for mathematical and algorithmic results in quantum computation, work on limits of computation, research on algorithms for optimizing integrated circuits and on electronic design automation, as well as artificial intelligence. Additionally, Markov is a California non-profit executive responsible for aid to Ukraine worth over a hundred million dollars.

References

  1. ↑ Aaronson, Scott. "Scott Aaronson". Qwiki.
  2. 1 2 Shetl-Optimized, "From Boston to Austin", February 28, 2016.
  3. ↑ "Statement of Jewish scientists opposing the "judicial reform" in Israel". Shtetl-Optimized. February 16, 2023. Retrieved March 28, 2023.
  4. ↑ "Statement of concern - Signatories". sites.google.com. Retrieved March 28, 2023.
  5. ↑ "Sam Bankman-Fried and the geometry of conscience". Shtetl-Optimized. November 13, 2022. Retrieved March 28, 2023. SBF and I both grew up as nerdy kids in middle-class Jewish American families,...
  6. 1 2 3 Hardesty, Larry (April 7, 2014). "The complexonaut". mit.edu. Retrieved April 12, 2014.
  7. 1 2 CV from Aaronson's web site
  8. ↑ Aaronson, Scott (December 5, 2017). "Quickies". Shtetl-Optimized. Retrieved January 30, 2018.
  9. ↑ Scott Joel Aaronson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  10. ↑ "OpenAI is developing a watermark to identify work from its GPT text AI". New Scientist. 2022. Retrieved December 31, 2022.
  11. ↑ "OpenAI!". Shtetl-Optimized. June 17, 2022. Retrieved December 31, 2022.
  12. ↑ NSF to Honor Two Early Career Researchers in Computational Science With Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation, March 8, 2012, retrieved March 8, 2012.
  13. ↑ Aaronson, Scott (2004). Limitations of Quantum Advice and One-Way Communication. Computational Complexity Conference. pp. 320–332.
  14. ↑ Aaronson, Scott (2003). Quantum Certificate Complexity. Computational Complexity Conference. pp. 171–178.
  15. ↑ "Future and Past Conferences". Computational Complexity Conference.
  16. ↑ "Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award". ACM.
  17. ↑ "The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers: Recipient Details: Scott Aaronson". NSF.
  18. ↑ "Six junior faculty named Sloan Research Fellows". MIT News. February 17, 2009. Retrieved March 18, 2024.
  19. ↑ Simons Investigators Awardees, The Simons Foundation
  20. ↑ 2019 ACM Fellows Recognized for Far-Reaching Accomplishments that Define the Digital Age, Association for Computing Machinery, retrieved December 11, 2019
  21. ↑ 2020, Association for Computing Machinery, retrieved April 14, 2021
  22. ↑ Automata, Computability and Complexity by Elaine Rich (2008) ISBN   0-13-228806-0, p. 589, section "The Complexity Zoo"
  23. ↑ The Complexity Zoo page (originally) at Qwiki (a quantum physics wiki, Stanford University)
  24. ↑ "Shtetl-Optimized". scottaaronson.com. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  25. ↑ Horgan, John. "Scott Aaronson Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question I Throw at Him". Scientific American. Retrieved June 9, 2021.
  26. ↑ Aaronson, Scott. "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?". academic personal website. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT. Retrieved January 2, 2014.
  27. ↑ "PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus". scottaaronson.com. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  28. ↑ "Quantum Computing Democritus :: Quantum physics, quantum information and quantum computation". cambridge.org. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
  29. ↑ Aaronson, Scott (2011). "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity". arXiv: 1108.1791v3 [CC cs. CC].
  30. ↑ Aaronson, Scott (February 2008). "The Limits of Quantum Computers". Scientific American. 298 (3): 50–7. Bibcode:2008SciAm.298c..62A. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0308-62. PMID   18357822.
  31. ↑ "Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference". The Science Show. ABC Radio. August 18, 2007. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  32. ↑ Peterson, Ivars (November 20, 1999). "Quantum Games". Science News. 156 (21). Science Service: 334–335. doi:10.2307/4012018. JSTOR   4012018 . Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  33. ↑ Franklin, Roger (November 17, 2002). "Two-digit theory gets two fingers". The Age. Melbourne. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  34. ↑ Judge, Peter (November 9, 2007). "D-Wave's quantum computer ready for latest demo". ZDNet. CNET. Archived from the original on December 26, 2008. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  35. ↑ Dawson, Keith (November 29, 2008). "Improving Wikipedia Coverage of Computer Science". Slashdot. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  36. ↑ Brooks, Michael (March 31, 2007). "Outside of time: The quantum gravity computer". New Scientist (2597).
  37. ↑ Pontin, Jason (April 8, 2007). "A Giant Leap Forward in Computing? Maybe Not". The New York Times. Retrieved December 1, 2008.
  38. ↑ Gomes, Lee (December 12, 2008). "Your World View Doesn't Compute". Forbes. Archived from the original on December 14, 2008.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.