| Scott Joel Aaronson | |
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Scott Joel Aaronson
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| Born | May 21, 1981 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Residence | USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Computational complexity theory, Quantum Computing |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study University of Waterloo |
| Alma mater | Cornell University University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Umesh Vazirani |
| Known for | Quantum Turing with postselection Algebrization |
Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981)[1] is a theoretical computer scientist and faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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He obtained his B.Sc. in computer science from Cornell University in 2000,[2] and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani.[3]
After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007.[2] His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.
He is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity.[4][5] He is the author of the much-read blog "Shtetl-Optimized" [6] as well as the essay Who Can Name The Bigger Number?.[7] 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's also taught a graduate-level survey course called Quantum Computing Since Democritus,[8] for which the notes are available online and which is expected to be published as a book by Cambridge University Press.[9] It weaves together seemingly disparate topics into a cohesive whole, including quantum mechanics, complexity, free will, time travel, the anthropic principle and many others. Many of these interdisciplinary applications of computational complexity were later fleshed out in his article "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity".[10] An article of Aaronson's, "The Limits of Quantum Computers", was published in Scientific American,[11] and he was a guest speaker at the 2007 Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference.[12] Aaronson is frequently cited in non-academic press, such as Science News,[13] The Age,[14] ZDNet,[15] Slashdot,[16] New Scientist,[17] The New York Times,[18] and Forbes Magazine.[19]
Aaronson was the subject of media attention in October 2007, when he accused an advertising agency of plagiarizing a lecture he wrote on quantum mechanics in an advertisement of theirs.[20] He alleged that a commercial for Ricoh Australia by Sydney-based agency Love Communications appropriated content almost verbatim from the lecture.[21] Aaronson received an apologetic email from the agency in which they claimed to have sought legal advice and did not believe that they were in violation of his copyright. Unsatisfied, Aaronson pursued the matter, and the agency settled the dispute without admitting wrongdoing by making a charitable contribution to two science organizations of his choice.[21]