18 January 2013 • Friday
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
Scott Aaronson is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received his PhD in computer science from University of California, Berkeley and did postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo. Scott's research interests center around fundamental limits on what can efficiently be computed in the physical world.
This has entailed studying quantum computing, the most powerful model of computation we have, based on known physical theory. Scott's work on this subject has included limitations of quantum algorithms in the black-box model; algorithms for quantum spatial search and for simulating restricted classes of quantum circuits; the learnability of quantum states; quantum versus classical proofs and advice; and quantum computing with linear optics. He also writes a popular blog, and is the creator of the Complexity Zoo, an online encyclopedia of computational complexity theory.