Henry Yuen

Come for the iconic papers and eye-wateringly beautiful textbooks, stay for the stories "from the trenches" (of which I hope John posts more of!). Keep writing, @johnwatrous.bsky.social !

Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography | Quanta Magazine In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

Out today in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: a new path toward building quantum cryptography on much harder problems than the ones used for classical encryption. Fascinating stuff!

From our very thoughtful law school colleague, David Pozen, a first take on the Columbia deal.
balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

I can almost smell the sea air from reading that...

Welcome! (What do you mean by inconveniently located??)

Agreed. Reminds me that I have no idea what it is but I keep hearing my colleagues talk about Rowhammer.

One of the great joys of 2025 (so far) has been learning about nonlocal quantum computation. It's an astonishingly interesting playground of ideas. In this fun collaboration with @hippoquantus.bsky.social, Simon, Alex, Mikka, and Philip, we uncover some hidden structure in this playground.

As seen in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Peter Carr was a great mathematician with an expertise in finance. I had the honor of being a colleague of his at Cornell before he moved to NYU, where he became a legendary teacher and a professor, much beloved.

The first rule of the One-Way Communication Complexity club is that Bob doesn't talk about the One-Way Communication Complexity club

For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time | Quanta Magazine One computer scientist’s “stunning” proof is the first progress in 50 years on one of the most famous questions in computer science.

Space and time are the most fundamental resources in computation, and researchers have long sought to understand how they’re related. A recent breakthrough by Ryan Williams marks the first progress on that question in 50 years. Read more in @quantamagazine.bsky.social!

First there was MATH POPE

Then there was MATH PRESIDENT

But in my opinion it is also a moral issue; I believe we should live in a society that values and protects free scientific inquiry. I can’t stand by and do nothing. (8/8)

Fighting for the restoration and protection of federal funding for basic research is an existential issue for me (because of my position, obviously). (7/8)

Calling congress is *directly providing them with feedback on the issues important to their voters*. This is apparently more effective and compelling than, say, emails about an issue. It’s much easier for people (or bots) to write emails, but there’s more of an activation barrier for calls. (6/8)

The staffers are interested in whether (a) you’re a potential voter for the representative, and (b) what are the most popular issues/topics that people call about. They’ll use this information to shape the positions/actions the representative take. (5/8)

They will jot down: your name, your address/zipcode, a couple keywords about your issue (in this case, “NSF funding” or “science funding”) and whether you’re for/against. That’s it. (4/8)

Fortunately, it’s much easier than that. When you call your congressperson’s office, you'll be greeted by some staffer -- a dutiful twenty-something who will politely listen to your spiel. (3/8)

I've been meaning to do for a couple months, but put it off because (a) I was busy and (b) frankly, I was a little nervous about doing so. What if the senator/representative actually picked up and I had to extemporaneously chat with them? (2/8)

On Friday I made my first-ever calls to congress to oppose funding cuts to NSF. It was super easy — it took just a couple minutes, and I read off a script provided by Save NSF (www.savensf.com). Afterwards, I felt good. The pervasive sense of powerlessness was held at bay, at least temporarily.(1/8)

Pie chart showing Harvard NSF grant terminations

New: We have the list of ~190 Harvard NSF grant terminations from internal agency sources. About $148 million intended funds killed. Over 1/3 are from the MPS directorate—roughly 75 math and physics grants.

A Letter to the Computing Research Community from Greg Hager - CRA Last week, CRA shared the news that Greg Hager would be stepping down as NSF Assistant Director for the CISE Directorate. As a follow-up to that announcement, we are sharing the following letter from Greg to the computing research community. In this personal message, he reflects on his decision to leave, recent developments at NSF, […]

Greg Hager talks about why he left the NSF.

cra.org/a-letter-to-...

Accepted papers at TQC 2025. tqc-conference.org/accepted-tal.... Many interesting-looking titles!

Prakash Murali and I are seeking to jointly recruit a postdoctoral researcher (Dowling postdoctoral fellow) at Cambridge focused on quantum algorithms, complexity, error correction, and architecture.

Further details: www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50485/

Deadline: 7 April 2025

Natalie @nat-parham.bsky.social has some bold new ways of proving quantum circuit lower bounds, with fascinating connections to condensed matter physics and the natural proofs barrier from complexity theory. There are some really interesting questions to explore here.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Some entertaining myth-making (from mathoverflow.net/a/491227/121...):

This past week, I received a second stop work order on one of my grants. This now means that we can no longer spend on *two* of my major grants. Several of my group members will now graduate earlier than expected, I am looking into being a consultant for the summer, and students will do internships

This is really unfortunate to hear, Mark.

Congratulations, Jeongwan Haah, recipient of the New Horizons in Physics Prize "for the discovery of Haah's code, in which fractal conservation laws emerge, and other models bringing discrete mathematical structures to physics"!
breakthroughprize.org/News/91

Congrats Kira!