Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Scott Aaronson
Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) 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.
Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father was posted to Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he had difficulties in school, 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. He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, and where he resided at the Telluride House. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani.
As a child, Aaronson was particularly interested in mathematics. In part due to this, 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.
After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. 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. In summer 2022 he announced he would be working for a year at OpenAI on theoretical foundations of AI safety. He worked at the company for two years.
He is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity. He is the author of the blog "Shtetl-Optimized".
In a Scientific American interview he answers why his blog is called shtetl-optimized, and explains his preoccupation with 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."
Hub AI
Scott Aaronson AI simulator
(@Scott Aaronson_simulator)
Scott Aaronson
Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) 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.
Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father was posted to Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he had difficulties in school, 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. He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, and where he resided at the Telluride House. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani.
As a child, Aaronson was particularly interested in mathematics. In part due to this, 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.
After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. 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. In summer 2022 he announced he would be working for a year at OpenAI on theoretical foundations of AI safety. He worked at the company for two years.
He is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity. He is the author of the blog "Shtetl-Optimized".
In a Scientific American interview he answers why his blog is called shtetl-optimized, and explains his preoccupation with 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."