Letter from the Director, March 2025

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley! We are gearing up for a busy wrap-up of the spring semester, with five back-to-back workshop weeks at the Simons Institute. And after a brief breather during which we will execute a planned upgrade of our auditorium’s A/V system, we will resume in mid-May for a bustling summer featuring a Cryptography program and a Quantum Computing summer cluster.

As you may know, in addition to hosting world-class research programs, the Simons Institute works to train the next generation of leaders in the field. Our postdoctoral-level research fellows are some of the most sought-after hires in the theory job market. And many other young scientists come to the Institute as graduate students, accompanying mentors who are long-term participants in our programs. When it comes to predoctoral education, we are enthusiastic sponsors of organizations that foster a strong and diverse pipeline of young scientists. We’re delighted to announce our new sponsorship of CodeSprint LA. We have also for several years provided resources of different kinds to the Berkeley Math Circle, Berkeley Math Tournament, Women in Theory biennial conference, and David Harold Blackwell Summer Research Institute. 

On SimonsTV, in our From the Archive series, we’re highlighting a 2015 talk by Chris Umans on some of the then state-of-the-art approaches to bound the matrix multiplication exponent, an evergreen fundamental topic that will be the subject of one of our upcoming fall program workshops.

In the Press this month is a lovely article about our colleague Irit Dinur, which appeared in Communications of the ACM. We are also showcasing a recent Quanta Magazine article about advances in the theoretical framework of catalytic computing (a counterintuitive phenomenon in which adding full storage space can aid computation), which has fueled recent breakthroughs in tree evaluation and space vs. time relationships.

Finally, I want to let you know that we’re now active on Bluesky. Hope to see you there. And for those working toward the FOCS deadline, good luck with your submissions!

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Interim Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing