Henry Yuen

Turing Award Goes to Quantum Science "Bennett and Brassard pioneered the field of quantum information theory... inspired by the ideas of Stephen Wiesner, a graduate student in the Columbia physics department in the 1960s." quantum.columbia.edu/news/turing-aw… quantamagazine.org/quantum-crypto…

@letonyo After computer scientists won the Nobel Physics prize, physicists now won the Turing Award. What an amazing time!

I'm thrilled that Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard have received the A. M. Turing Award for “their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.” Congratulations! quantamagazine.org/quantum-crypto…

Happy days! A perfect excuse to share my favourite quantum cryptography origin story, as recounted in Brassard’s paper: arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0…

@YFilmus Sanjeev Khanna says: will open next week!

@henryquantum Submissions are currently closed…

FOCS 2026 will be held in New York City Nov 8 - 11! CFP is up (link below). Submit your best work in theoretical computer science by April 1, 5pm ET.

@or_sattath I guess I consider high min-entropy "pretty random" :)

@henryquantum Thanks @henryquantum ! A technicality: we show that the distribution has high min-entropy (not that it is epsilon-close to uniformly random). Public randomness is still an open problem.

Casper, Nehoran, and Sattath's new paper constructs cryptographically-secure proofs that a given number was randomly generated by a quantum computer, and furthermore the proofs are *publicly verifiable*: you don't have to interact with the quantum computer to believe the proof.

Ravi Vakil on learning via osmosis from seminars. The backfilling part, where your vague semi-understanding becomes sharp, is very satisfactory.

@thesasho I guess if everything compiles, assuming no soundness bugs, then in principle the only thing you have to check is whether the final statement is properly formalized (rather than having to check a long proof).

I keep seeing these claims and I don’t really get it. Aside from the issues of missing foundations and Lean engine bugs, isn’t it still pretty hard to verify if something was correctly formalized?

@benbenbrubaker Transforming quantum data may be less like solving a hard math problem, and more like doing an intricate dance.

I discuss "fully quantum" complexity theory with @benbenbrubaker. Although we don't know for sure, it seems like understanding the complexity of computing on quantum data needs new foundations.

The new SIGACT Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work promotes and recognizes high-impact work expositing ideas and results from the theory of computation. Nomination deadline is April 10th. sigact.org/prizes/trevisa…

Thomas Watson has a new computational complexity textbook about to be published by Cambridge University Press. There's a free version online for personal use. complexityincs.com

Congratulations to these outstanding students. I've had the privilege of working with Christine, who is now looking for PhD programs in quantum information and theoretical computer science.

Congratulations Luca and Christine! "Two Columbians Named Churchill Scholars" Luca Nashabeh, "a Rabi Scholar [pioneers] experimental scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in the Pasupathy lab, aiming to discover and explain unique quantum phenomena" urf.columbia.edu/news/two-colum…

Welcome Zhaoyou!

@sebalexwill Congrats @sebalexwill and Nanfang!

New paper out in Nature! Together with the Yu Lab at Columbia, we realize single-atom trapping using metasurface optical tweezers and show a path toward atomic arrays with >100,000 traps. Huge thanks to the entire team @ TweeSr Lab and Yu Lab! nature.com/articles/s4158…

I’m hiring a postdoc to work on core problems in LLMs: inference, structure, and generalization. This is theory-meets-practice work, with room to go deep. If this resonates, feel free to email me.