Letter from the Director, January 2024

Dear friends,

I’m happy to be writing to you again from Berkeley, after a six-month sabbatical. This semester, we are hosting a pair of interrelated programs — on Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance, and on Error-Correcting Codes: Theory and Practice. Our senior scientist Nikhil Srivastava provides an introduction to these exciting topics, as well as an in-depth discussion of new developments in max flow, in the latest installment of Theory at the Institute and Beyond.

In our SimonsTV corner this month, we’re highlighting Adrian Vladu’s talk on Discrepancy Minimization via Regularization from our recent workshop on Optimization and Algorithm Design.

And in this first newsletter of 2024, we are rolling out a new “In the Press” corner, highlighting coverage of theoretical computer science in the public sphere. In this month’s issue, we’ve included Quanta Magazine’s roundup of the most important developments in computer science in 2023 — most of which were theory.

Wishing you a bright new year,

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing