Appreciation and memories of Jim Simons (1938–2024), from the Simons Institute community. Featuring contributions from Avi Wigderson, Dick Karp, Shafi...
Simons Institute Senior Scientist Venkatesan Guruswami, along with Bingkai Lin, Yican Sun, and Berkeley theory graduate students Xuandi Ren and Kewen...
We are heartbroken by the loss of Luca Trevisan, who served as senior scientist at the Institute from 2014 to 2019.
We are delighted to announce that PayPal has joined our community of industry partners. PayPal highlights the importance of theoretical computing in financial services through the work of its new blockchain technology research group, complemented by its AI research team.
At the Simons Institute, we are experiencing one of the most exciting and jam-packed semesters since the Institute opened. In addition to vibrant programs on Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference and Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling, we are hosting ongoing research pods in Quantum Computing and Machine Learning. And the building is lively with three new cohorts of postdocs — one associated with each pod, and a group of Simons-Berkeley postdoctoral researchers funded by a new grant from the Simons Foundation. All told, the population of postdoctoral-level scholars at the Institute over the course of the year is up 69% from the level in 2019–20.
Despite the constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, this was a year of tremendous growth for the Simons Institute. Thanks to generous grants from the Simons Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Energy (DOE), we have added three new cohorts of postdocs to the Institute community.
There is some good news from the front lines on circuit complexity, one of the most challenging arenas within theoretical computer science. An algebraic circuit consists of gates, each of which carries out either addition or multiplication over some field, say real numbers. The depth of the circuit is the length of the longest path from the output to one of its inputs. Naturally, an algebraic circuit computes a polynomial over its inputs.
A profile of Ingrid Daubechies by former Simons Institute Journalist in Residence Siobhan Roberts.
I hope all of you enjoyed a restorative summer. We are happy to be running in-person research programs again this fall — on Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference (CCSI), and on Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling (GMOS).
Yuansi Chen, an assistant professor at Duke University, made substantial progress last year toward proving the Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits (KLS) conjecture and, with it, the Bourgain slicing conjecture.
The Simons Institute's Breakthroughs series kicked off on June 16 with a talk by Virginia Vassilevska Williams of MIT, who recently developed the fastest method to date for multiplying two matrices, in collaboration with Josh Alman of Columbia.