Mark M. Wilde

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premier techno-superpower may be over.

Previous historic examples of deliberate destruction of scientific institutions from within a country.
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely

mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

For the math folks on here: NSF has suspended Terry Tao's grant. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Today is Cornell Quantum Day:

quantum.cornell.edu/cornell-quan...

We have a schedule of external and student speakers lined up, with a blend of theory and experiment

excellent! I've been waiting for some time on this one!

tagging @mvscerezo.bsky.social

A Linearly Convergent Algorithm for Computing the Petz-Augustin Mean We study the computation of the Petz-Augustin mean of order $\alpha \in (0,1) \cup (1,\infty)$, defined as the minimizer of a weighted sum of $n$ Petz-Rényi divergences of order $\alpha$ over the set ...

from scirate.com/arxiv/2502.0... :

"our proposed algorithm can be interpreted as a tâtonnement dynamic"

It is always a good strategy in academia to use technical terms that no one else knows, in order to pique the curiosity of readers

How does this approach distinguish entanglement theory with LOCC as free operations and entanglement theory with separable operations as free operations? This is typically a very important distinction.

the Browns meet!

Was Dan Browne there also? :)

Pelicans would migrate for a few weeks every year to the LSU Lakes. It was really something to behold when they would arrive, having a certain beauty and elegance

I didn't know how to interpret your original post and thought it was intended as a criticism of the linked paper.

Now I understand you meant to link to a different paper.

Typically American Physical Society assigns editors & reviewers no longer than a week or two after initial submission. Three months is extremely unusual, which is why I posted about it.

My coauthor & I have positions, but most graduate students I've worked with have no interest in submitting to QJ

It took Quantum Journal three months and two reminders to invite reviewers for my submission there. Within one hour of receiving the invitation to review, the invited reviewers confirmed.

To stay relevant, Quantum Journal will certainly need to improve significantly in this regard.

Ian George, @christophhirche.bsky.social, Theshani Nuradha, & I have issued an update of our q. Doeblin coefficients paper:

arxiv.org/abs/2503.22823

Main changes consist of an expanded section 8.5 on mixing, indistinguishability, & decoupling times of quantum Markov chains. See attached images

thanks for sharing. makes sense. Developing long mathematical proofs while maintaining concentration and focus is more difficult in LaTeX for me, while a program like LyX makes it much easier to focus.

I upgraded my laptop recently and had a very difficult time getting Scientific Workplace (SW) installed due to backward compatibility issues. So I was very relieved this past weekend to install LyX and realize it is capable of doing everything I need, and it actually appears to be superior to SW now

ok, I see. I've used Scientific Workplace for my whole research career (since about 2006) and so I've really gotten used to brainstorming and writing notes with that kind of editor. I rediscovered LyX and noticed that it has significantly improved since the last time I tried it.

thanks a lot for pointing me to it. It certainly looks very interesting.

For me, moving toward it would depend on whether collaborators of mine would use it or push me to it. Realistically, I would keep using LyX and overleaf since that is compatible with my collaborative research projects.

Thanks for your reply. So you write your math notes in LyX. Then when you write a paper, do you just copy-paste all of the math parts from your math notes (i.e., LaTeX file exported by LyX) into your paper? If so, this seems quite a sensible approach.

I am curious about QI people who use LyX to help write their research papers and math notes. I noticed @quantum-journal.bsky.social has a LyX template, which suggests the # of people using it is sizable. Please reply here if you do. I recently switched from Scientific Workplace to LyX & am impressed

This resolves an important open question for quantum sample complexity by identifying a *unique* quantity that characterizes the sample complexity of hypothesis testing and the query complexity of channel discrimination for classical-quantum (cq) channels.

Theshani Nuradha & I issued an important update of our paper on query complexity of q. channel discrimination:

arxiv.org/abs/2504.12989

Building on arxiv.org/abs/2506.13686, we gave a tight characterization of sample complexity of state discrimination & query complexity of cq channels. See images

I think because I replied to the original post and not to the follow-on. Twitter was like this also

Postdoc opening in my group:
careers.nus.edu.sg/job/Research...

Fleetwood Mac and Foreigner sound nothing like each other :)

I sang this and played it with my high school rock band :) . Learned about it through others

Congrats on this achievement! Certainly nice that you are relatively nearby Cornell

I posted my slides on resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability:

zenodo.org/records/1577...

Joint work w/ @wangxinfelix.bsky.social from 2019 & came up in discussions at #ISIT2025. This work gave the first proper operational interpretation for smooth max-relative entropy

Thanks for tagging me. Your paper is very interesting.

RIP Ray Laflamme, gone too soon.

Ray was a stellar scientist, the founding director of ⁦‪the IQC‬⁩ and ⁦‪of CIFAR's‬⁩ Quantum Information program, but more importantly a warm & generous human who built community and helped many (particularly junior researchers).

May his memory be a blessing.