Letter from the Director, April 2024

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley. This month we learned that Avi Wigderson received the ACM A.M. Turing Award. Avi is a beacon of light in the field of theoretical computer science, and has been a godfather of sorts to the Simons Institute since the beginning. Legend has it that Avi was one of the first people to raise the idea of establishing an institute dedicated to research in the theory of computing to Jim Simons. He became a founding member of our Scientific Advisory Board, and has spoken at the Institute almost every year since then. In celebration of his receipt of the Turing Award, we are sharing a special playlist of Avi’s talks at the Simons Institute, from 2013 to 2024.

In other news, the Simons Institute has launched a new research pod — on Resilience in Brain, Natural, and Algorithmic Systems. I will be co-directing the pod in collaboration with Senior Scientist Venkat Guruswami and our neuroscientist colleague Daniela Kaufer, from Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology. You can read more about this exciting initiative here.

This year, we’ve been experimenting with a new, shorter format for visits from science communicators in residence, allowing for visits from a greater number of individuals. It so happened that three of these visits — from Alex Bellos, Ananyo Bhattacharya, and Ben Brubaker — aligned in March. We decided to mark the occasion with a Theoretically Speaking panel discussion on communicating algorithmic science to the public, moderated by our incoming associate director, Sampath Kannan. The discussion was lively and far-reaching, and we’re delighted to share it with you in our SimonsTV corner this month.

The folks at Quanta Magazine have been covering topics of interest in theoretical computer science, and we’re sharing some of their recent pieces — on Avi, on Russell Impagliazzo, on quantum advantage, and on neural networks — in the In the Press section of this newsletter.

I hope all’s well with you, and that we will meet in Berkeley soon.

Yours,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing