## Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

### An update on the campaign to defend serious math education in California

Tuesday, April 26th, 2022

Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his personal answers to the most common questions about what I called our “campaign to defend serious math education.” It directly addresses several issues that have already come up in the comments. Check it out!

As you might remember, last December I hosted a guest post about the “California Mathematics Framework” (CMF), which was set to cause radical changes to precollege math in California—e.g., eliminating 8th-grade algebra and making it nearly impossible to take AP Calculus. I linked to an open letter setting out my and my colleagues’ concerns about the CMF. That letter went on to receive more than 1700 signatures from STEM experts in industry and academia from around the US, including recipients of the Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, and Turing Award, as well as a lot of support from college-level instructors in California.

Following widespread pushback, a new version of the CMF appeared in mid-March. I and others are gratified that the new version significantly softens the opposition to acceleration in high school math and to calculus as a central part of mathematics.  Nonetheless, we’re still concerned that the new version promotes a narrative about data science that’s a recipe for cutting kids off from any chance at earning a 4-year college degree in STEM fields (including, ironically, in data science itself).

To that end, some of my Californian colleagues have issued a new statement today on behalf of academic staff at 4-year colleges in California, aimed at clearing away the fog on how mathematics is related to data science. I strongly encourage my readers on the academic staff at 4-year colleges in California to sign this commonsense statement, which has already been signed by over 250 people (including, notably, at least 50 from Stanford, home of two CMF authors).

As a public service announcement, I’d also like to bring to wider awareness Section 18533 of the California Education Code, for submitting written statements to the California State Board of Education (SBE) about errors, objections, and concerns in curricular frameworks such as the CMF.

The SBE is scheduled to vote on the CMF in mid-July, and their remaining meeting before then is on May 18-19 according to this site, so it is really at the May meeting that concerns need to be aired.  Section 18533 requires submissions to be written (yes, snail mail) and postmarked at least 10 days before the SBE meeting. So to make your voice heard by the SBE, please send your written concern by certified mail (for tracking, but not requiring signature for delivery), no later than Friday May 6, to State Board of Education, c/o Executive Secretary of the State Board of Education, 1430 N Street, Room 5111, Sacramento, CA 95814, complemented by an email submission to sbe@cde.ca.gov and mathframework@cde.ca.gov.

### Back

Saturday, April 23rd, 2022

Thanks to everyone who asked whether I’m OK! Yeah, I’ve been living, loving, learning, teaching, worrying, procrastinating, just not blogging.

Last week, Takashi Yamakawa and Mark Zhandry posted a preprint to the arXiv, “Verifiable Quantum Advantage without Structure,” that represents some of the most exciting progress in quantum complexity theory in years. I wish I’d thought of it. tl;dr they show that relative to a random oracle (!), there’s an NP search problem that quantum computers can solve exponentially faster than classical ones. And yet this is 100% consistent with the Aaronson-Ambainis Conjecture!

A student brought my attention to Quantle, a variant of Wordle where you need to guess a true equation involving 1-qubit quantum states and unitary transformations. It’s really well-done! Possibly the best quantum game I’ve seen.

Last month, Microsoft announced on the web that it had achieved an experimental breakthrough in topological quantum computing: not quite the creation of a topological qubit, but some of the underlying physics required for that. This followed their needing to retract their previous claim of such a breakthrough, due to the criticisms of Sergey Frolov and others. One imagines that they would’ve taken far greater care this time around. Unfortunately, a research paper doesn’t seem to be available yet. Anyone with further details is welcome to chime in.

Woohoo! Maximum flow, maximum bipartite matching, matrix scaling, and isotonic regression on posets (among many others)—all algorithmic problems that I was familiar with way back in the 1990s—are now solvable in nearly-linear time, thanks to a breakthrough by Chen et al.! Many undergraduate algorithms courses will need to be updated.

For those interested, Steve Hsu recorded a podcast with me where I talk about quantum complexity theory.

### Scott Aaronson Speculation Grant WINNERS!

Friday, February 4th, 2022

Two weeks ago, I announced on this blog that, thanks to the remarkable generosity of Jaan Tallinn, and the Speculation Grants program of the Survival and Flourishing Fund that Jaan founded, I had $200,000 to give away to charitable organizations of my choice. So, inspired by what Scott Alexander had done, I invited the readers of Shtetl-Optimized to pitch their charities, mentioning only some general areas of interest to me (e.g., advanced math education at the precollege level, climate change mitigation, pandemic preparedness, endangered species conservation, and any good causes that would enrage the people who attack me on Twitter). I’m grateful to have gotten more than twenty well-thought-out pitches; you can read a subset of them in the comment thread. Now, having studied them all, I’ve decided—as I hadn’t at the start—to use my entire allotment to make as strong a statement as I can about a single cause: namely, subject-matter passion and excellence in precollege STEM education. I’ll be directing funds to some shockingly cash-starved math camps, math circles, coding outreach programs, magnet schools, and enrichment programs, in Maine and Oregon and England and Ghana and Ethiopia and Jamaica. The programs I’ve chosen target a variety of ability levels, not merely the “mathematical elite.” Several explicitly focus on minority and other underserved populations. But they share a goal of raising every student they work with as high as possible, rather than pushing the students down to fit some standardized curriculum. Language like that ought to be meaningless boilerplate, but alas, it no longer is. We live in a time when the state of California, in a misguided pursuit of “modernization” and “equity,” is poised to eliminate 8th-grade algebra, make it nearly impossible for high-school seniors to take AP Calculus, and shunt as many students as possible from serious mathematical engagement into a “data science pathway” that in practice might teach little more than how to fill in spreadsheets. (This watering-down effort now itself looks liable to be watered down—but only because of a furious pushback from parents and STEM professionals, pushback in which I’m proud that this blog played a small role.) We live in a time when elite universities are racing to eliminate the SAT—thus, for all their highminded rhetoric, effectively slamming the door on thousands of nerdy kids from poor or immigrant backgrounds who know how to think, but not how to shine in a college admissions popularity pageant. We live in a time when America’s legendary STEM magnet high schools, from Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to Bronx Science to Lowell in San Francisco, rather than being celebrated as the national treasures that they are, or better yet replicated, are bitterly attacked as “elitist” (even while competitive sports and music programs are not similarly attacked)—and are now being forcibly “demagnetized” by bureaucrats, made all but indistinguishable from other high schools, over the desperate pleas of their students, parents, and alumni. And—alright, fine, on a global scale, arresting climate change is surely a higher-priority issue than protecting the intellectual horizons of a few teenage STEM nerds. The survival of liberal democracy is a higher-priority issue. Pandemic preparedness, poverty, malnutrition are higher-priority issues. Some of my friends strongly believe that the danger of AI becoming super-powerful and taking over the world is the highest-priority issue … and truthfully, with this week’s announcements of AlphaCode and OpenAI’s theorem prover, which achieve human-competitive performance in elite programming and math competitions respectively, I can’t confidently declare that they’re wrong. On the other hand, when you think about the astronomical returns on every penny that was invested in setting a teenage Ramanujan or Einstein or Turing or Sofya Kovalevskaya or Norman Borlaug or Mario Molina onto their trajectories in life … and the comically tiny budgets of the world-leading programs that aim to nurture the next Ramanujans, to the point where$10,000 often seems like a windfall to those programs … well, you might come to the conclusion that the “protecting nerds” thing actually isn’t that far down the global priority list! Like, it probably cracks the top ten.

And there’s more to it than that. There’s a reason beyond parochialism, it dawned on me, why individual charities tend to specialize in wildlife conservation in Ecuador or deworming in Swaziland or some other little domain, rather than simply casting around for the highest-priority cause on earth. Expertise matters—since one wants to make, not only good judgments about which stuff to support, but good judgments that most others can’t or haven’t made. In my case, it would seem sensible to leverage the fact that I’m Scott Aaronson. I’ve spent much of my career in math/CS education and outreach—mostly, of course, at the university level, but by god did I personally experience the good and the bad in nearly every form of precollege STEM education! I’m pretty confident in my ability to distinguish the two, and for whatever I don’t know, I have close friends in the area who I trust.

There’s also a practical issue: in order for me to fund something, the recipient has to fill out a somewhat time-consuming application to SFF. If I’d added, say, another $20,000 drop into the bucket of global health or sustainability or whatever, there’s no guarantee that the intended recipients of my largesse would even notice, or care enough to go through the application process if they did. With STEM education, by contrast, holy crap! I’ve got an inbox full of Shtetl-Optimized readers explaining how their little math program is an intellectual oasis that’s changed the lives of hundreds of middle-schoolers in their region, and how$20,000 would mean the difference between their program continuing or not. That’s someone who I trust to fill out the form.

Without further ado, then, here are the first-ever Scott Aaronson Speculation Grants:

• $57,000 for Canada/USA Mathcamp, which changed my life when I attended it as a 15-year-old in 1996, and which I returned to as a lecturer in 2008. The funds will be used for COVID testing to allow Mathcamp to resume in-person this summer, and perhaps scholarships and off-season events as well. •$30,000 for AddisCoder, which has had spectacular success teaching computer science to high-school students in Ethiopia, placing some of its alumni at elite universities in the US, to help them expand to a new “JamCoders” program in Jamaica. These programs were founded by UC Berkeley’s amazing Jelani Nelson, also with involvement from friend and Shtetl-Optimized semi-regular Boaz Barak.
• $30,000 for the Maine School of Science and Mathematics, which seems to offer a curriculum comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Bronx Science, or the nation’s other elite magnet high schools, but (1) on a shoestring budget and (2) in rural Maine. I hadn’t even heard of MSSM before Alex Altair, an alum and Shtetl-Optimized reader, told me about it, but now I couldn’t be prouder to support it. •$30,000 for the Eugene Math Circle, which provides a math enrichment lifeline to kids in Oregon, and whose funding was just cut. This donation will keep the program alive for another year.
• $13,000 for the Summer Science Program, which this summer will offer research experiences to high-school juniors in astrophysics, biochemistry, and genomics. •$10,000 for the MISE Foundation, which provides math enrichment for the top middle- and high-school students in Ghana.
• $10,000 for Number Champions, which provides one-on-one coaching to kids in the UK who struggle with math. •$10,000 for Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics (BEAM), which runs math summer programs in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere for underserved populations.
• $10,000 for Powderhouse, an innovative lab school being founded in Somerville, MA. While working on this, it crossed my mind that, on my deathbed, I might be at least as happy about having directed funds to efforts like these as about any of my research or teaching. To the applicants who weren’t chosen: I’m sorry, as many of you had wonderful projects too! As I said in the earlier post, you remain warmly invited to apply to SFF, and to make your pitch to the other Speculators and/or the main SFF committee. Needless to say, anyone who feels inspired should add to my (or rather, SFF’s) modest contributions to these STEM programs. My sense is that, while$200k can go eye-poppingly far in this area, it still hasn’t come close to exhausting even the lowest-hanging fruit.

Also needless to say, the opinions in this post are my own and are not necessarily shared by SFF or by the organizations I’m supporting. The latter are welcome to disagree with me as long as they keep up their great work!

Huge thanks again to Jaan, to SFF, to my SFF contact Andrew Critch, to everyone (whether chosen or not) who participated in this contest, and to everyone who’s putting in work to broaden kids’ intellectual horizons or otherwise make the world a little less horrible.

### Win a Scott Aaronson Speculation Grant!

Thursday, January 20th, 2022

Exciting news, everyone! Jaan Tallinn, who many of you might recognize as a co-creator of Skype, tech enthusiast, and philanthropist, graciously invited me, along with a bunch of other nerds, to join the new Speculation Grants program of the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF). In plain language, that means that Jaan is giving me $200,000 to distribute to charitable organizations in any way I see fit—though ideally, my choices will have something to do with the survival and flourishing of our planet and civilization. (If all goes well, this blog post will actually lead to a lot more than just$200,000 in donations, because it will inspire applications to SFF that can then be funded by other “Speculators” or by SFF’s usual process.)

Thinking about how to handle the responsibility of this amazing and unexpected gift, I decided that I couldn’t possibly improve on what Scott Alexander did with his personal grants program on Astral Codex Ten. Thus: I hereby invite the readers of Shtetl-Optimized to pitch registered charities (which might or might not be their own)—especially, charities that are relatively small, unknown, and unappreciated, yet that would resonate strongly with someone who thinks the way I do. Feel free to renominate (i.e., bring back to my attention) charities that were mentioned when I asked a similar question after winning $250,000 from the ACM Prize in Computing. If you’re interested, there’s a two-step process this time: Step 1 is to make your pitch to me, either by a comment on this post or by email to me, depending on whether you’d prefer the pitch to be public or private. Let’s set a deadline for this step of Thursday, January 27, 2022 (i.e., one week from now). Your pitch can be extremely short, like 1 paragraph, although I might ask you followup questions. After January 27, I’ll then take one of two actions in response: I’ll either (a) commit a specified portion of my$200,000 to your charity, if the charity formally applies to SFF, and if the charity isn’t excluded for some unexpected reason (5 sexual harassment lawsuits against its founders or whatever), and if one of my fellow “Speculators” doesn’t fund your charity before I do … or else I’ll

(b) not commit, in which case your charity can still apply for funding from SFF! One of the other Speculators might fund it, or it might be funded by the “ordinary” SFF process.

Step 2, which cannot be skipped, is then to have your charity submit a formal application to SFF. The application form isn’t too bad. But if the charity isn’t your own, it would help enormously if you at least knew someone at the charity, so you could tell them to apply to SFF. Again, Step 2 can be taken regardless of the outcome of Step 1.

The one big rule is that anything you suggest has to be a registered, tax-exempt charity in either the US or the UK. I won’t be distributing funds myself, but only advising SFF how to do so, and this is SFF’s rule, not mine. So alas, no political advocacy groups and no individuals. Donating to groups outside the US and UK is apparently possible but difficult.

While I’m not putting any restrictions on the scope, let me list a few examples of areas of interest to me.

• Advanced math and science education at the precollege level: gifted programs, summer camps, online resources, or anything, really, that aims to ensure that the next Ramanujan or von Neumann isn’t lost to the world.
• Conservation of endangered species.
• Undervalued approaches to dealing with the climate catastrophe (including new approaches to nuclear energy, geoengineering, and carbon capture and storage … or even, e.g., studies of the effects of rising CO2 on cognition and how to mitigate them).
• Undervalued approaches to preventing or mitigating future pandemics—basically, anything dirt-cheap that we wish had been done before covid.
• Almost anything that Scott Alexander might have funded if he’d had more money.
• Anything that would enrage the SneerClubbers or those who attack me on Twitter, by doing stuff that even they would have to acknowledge makes the world better, but that does so via people, organizations, and means that they despise.

Two examples of areas that I don’t plan to focus on are:

• AI-risk and other “strongly rationalist-flavored” organizations (these are already well-covered by others at SFF, so that I don’t expect to have an advantage), and
• quantum computing research (this is already funded by a zillion government agencies, companies, and venture capitalists).

Anyway, thanks so much to Jaan and to SFF for giving me this incredible opportunity, and I look forward to seeing what y’all come up with!

Note: Any other philanthropists who read this blog, and who’d like to add to the amount, are more than welcome to do so!

### My values, howled into the wind

Sunday, December 19th, 2021

I’m about to leave for a family vacation—our first such since before the pandemic, one planned and paid for literally the day before the news of Omicron broke. On the negative side, staring at the case-count graphs that are just now going vertical, I estimate a ~25% chance that at least one of us will get Omicron on this trip. On the positive side, I estimate a ~60% chance that in the next 6 months, at least one of us would’ve gotten Omicron or some other variant even without this trip—so maybe it’s just as well if we get it now, when we’re vaxxed to the maxx and ready and school and university are out.

If, however, I do end this trip dead in an ICU, I wouldn’t want to do so without having clearly set out my values for posterity. So with that in mind: in the comments of my previous post, someone asked me why I identify as a liberal or a progressive, if I passionately support educational practices like tracking, ability grouping, acceleration, and (especially) encouraging kids to learn advanced math whenever they’re ready for it. (Indeed, that might be my single stablest political view, having been held, for recognizably similar reasons, since I was about 5.)

Incidentally, that previous post was guest-written by my colleagues Edith Cohen and Boaz Barak, and linked to an open letter that now has almost 1500 signatories. Our goal was, and is, to fight the imminent dumbing-down of precollege math education in the United States, spearheaded by the so-called “California Mathematics Framework.” In our joint efforts, we’ve been careful with every word—making sure to maintain the assent of our entire list of signatories, to attract broad support, to stay narrowly focused on the issue at hand, and to bend over backwards to concede much as we could. Perhaps because of those cautions, we—amazingly—got some actual traction, reaching people in government (such as Rep. Ro Khanna, D – Silicon Valley) and technology leaders, and forcing the “no one’s allowed to take Algebra in 8th grade” faction to respond to us.

This was disorienting to me. On this blog, I’m used just to howling into the wind, having some agree, some disagree, some take to Twitter to denounce me, but in any case, having no effect of any kind on the real world.

It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?

… who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?

… who wants to smash systems of entrenched privilege in college admissions … and believes that the SAT and other standardized tests are the best tools ever invented for that purpose?

… who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor?

… who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth?

… who wants to legalize marijuana and psychedelics, and also legalize all the promising treatments currently languishing in FDA approval hell?

… who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions?

… who thinks the covid response of the CDC, FDA, and other authorities was a historic disgrace—not because it infringed on the personal liberties of antivaxxers or anything like that, but on the contrary, because it was weak, timid, bureaucratic, and slow, where it should’ve been like that of a general at war?

… who thinks the Nazi Holocaust was even worse than the mainstream holds it to be, because in addition to the staggering, one-lifetime-isn’t-enough-to-internalize-it human tragedy, the Holocaust also sent up into smoke whatever cultural process had just produced Einstein, von Neumann, Bohr, Szilard, Born, Meitner, Wigner, Haber, Pauli, Cantor, Hausdorff, Ulam, Tarski, Erdös, and Noether, and with it, one of the wellsprings of our technological civilization?

… who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?

… who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?

… who’s (of course) disgusted to the core by Trump and everything he represents, but who’s also disgusted by the elite virtue-signalling hypocrisy that made the rise of a Trump-like backlash figure predictable?

… who not only supports abortion rights, but also looks forward to a near future when parents, if they choose, are free to use embryo selection to make their children happier, smarter, healthier, and free of life-crippling diseases (unless the “bioethicists” destroy that future, as a previous generation of Deep Thinkers destroyed our nuclear future)?

… who, when reading about the 1960s Sexual Revolution, instinctively sides with free-loving hippies and against the scolds … even if today’s scolds are themselves former hippies, or intellectual descendants thereof, who now clothe their denunciations of other people’s gross, creepy sexual desires in the garb of feminism and social justice?

What, finally, do you call someone whose image of an ideal world might include a young Black woman wearing a hijab, an old Orthodox man with black hat and sidecurls, a broad-shouldered white guy from the backwoods of Alabama, and a trans woman with purple hair, face tattoos and a nose ring … all of them standing in front of a blackboard and arguing about what would happen if Alice and Bob jumped into opposite ends of a wormhole?

Do you call such a person “liberal,” “progressive,” “center-left,” “centrist,” “Pinkerite,” “technocratic,” “neoliberal,” “libertarian-ish,” “classical liberal”? Why not simply call them “correct”? 🙂

### An alarming trend in K-12 math education: a guest post and an open letter

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Updates: Our open letter made the WSJ, and has been tweeted by Matt Yglesias and others. See also Boaz Barak’s thread, and a supportive tweet from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Silicon Valley). If you’re just arriving here, try TodayMag for an overview of some of the issues at stake. Added: Newsweek. See also this post in Spanish. And see a post by Greg Ashman for more details on what’s been happening in California.

Today, I’m turning over Shtetl-Optimized to an extremely important guest post by theoretical computer scientists Boaz Barak of Harvard and Edith Cohen of Google (cross-posted on the windows on theory blog). In addition to the post below, please read—and if relevant, consider signing—our open letter about math education in the US, which now has over 150 now 535 746 952 1225 1415 signatories, including Fields Medalists, Turing Award winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Nobel laureates. Finally, check out our fuller analysis of what the California Mathematics Framework is poised to do and why it’s such an urgent crisis for math education. I’m particularly grateful to my colleagues for their writing efforts, since I would never have been able to discuss what’s happening in such relatively measured words. –Scott Aaronson

Mathematical education at the K-12 level is critical for preparation for STEM careers. An ongoing challenge to the US K-12 system is to improve the preparation of students for advanced mathematics courses and expand access and enrollment in these courses. As stated by a Department of Education report “taking Algebra I before high school … can set students up for a strong foundation of STEM education and open the door for various college and career options.” The report states that while 80% of all students have access to Algebra I in middle school, only 24% enroll. This is also why the goal of Bob Moses’ Algebra Project is to ensure that “every child must master algebra, preferably by eighth grade, for algebra is the gateway to the college-prep curriculum, which in turn is the path to higher education.”

The most significant potential for growth is among African American or Latino students, among whom only 12% enroll in Algebra before high school. This untapped potential has longer-term implications for both society and individuals. For example, although African Americans and Latinos comprise 13% and 18% (respectively) of the overall US population, they only account for 4% and 11% of engineering degrees. There is also a gap in access by income: Calculus is offered in 92% of schools serving the top income quartile but only in 77% of schools serving the bottom quartile (as measured by the share of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch). Thus minority and low income students have less access to STEM jobs, which yield more than double the median salary of non-STEM jobs, and are projected to grow at a 50% higher rate over the next decade.

Given these disparities, we applaud efforts such as the Algebra Project, the Calculus Project, and Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics that increase access to advanced mathematical education to underserved students. However, we are concerned by recent approaches, such as the proposed California Math Framework (CMF) revisions,  that take the opposite direction.

See this document for a detailed analysis and critique of the CMF, but the bottom line is that rather than trying to elevate under-served students, such “reforms” reduce access and options for all students. In particular, the CMF encourages schools to stop offering Algebra I in middle school, while placing obstacles (such as doubling-up, compressed courses, or outside-of-school private courses) in the way of those who want to take advanced math in higher grades. When similar reforms were implemented in San Francisco, they resulted in an “inequitable patchwork scheme” of workarounds that affluent students could access but that their less privileged counterparts could not. The CMF also promotes trendy and shallow courses (such as a nearly math-free version of  “data science”) as recommended alternatives  to foundational mathematical courses such as Algebra and Calculus. These courses do not prepare students even for careers in data science itself!

As educators and practitioners, we have seen first-hand the value of solid foundations in mathematics for pursuing college-level STEM education and a productive STEM career.

While well-intentioned, we believe that many of the changes proposed by the CMF are deeply misguided and will disproportionately harm under-resourced students. Adopting them would result in a student population that is less prepared to succeed in STEM and other 4-year quantitative degrees in college.  The CMF states that “many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning in grade eight (or sooner) because of mistaken beliefs that Calculus is an important high school goal.” Students, parents, and teachers are not mistaken. Neither is the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which set in 2015 a goal to double the number of African American students taking calculus by 2025. Calculus is not the only goal of K-12 math education, but it is important for students who wish to prepare for STEM in college and beyond.

We agree that calculus is not the “be-all and end-all” of high-school mathematics education. In particular, we encourage introducing options such as logic, probability, discrete mathematics, and algorithms design in the K-12 curriculum, as they can be valuable foundations for STEM education in college. However, when taught beyond a superficial level (which unfortunately is not the case in the CMF “data science” proposals), these topics are not any easier  than calculus. They require the same foundations of logic, algebra, and functions, and fluency with numbers and calculations. Indeed, the career paths with the highest potential for growth require more and deeper mathematical preparation than ever before. Calculus and other mathematical foundations are not important because they are admission requirements for colleges, or because they are relics of the “Sputnik era”. They are important because they provide fundamental knowledge and ways of thinking that are necessary for success in these fast growing and in-demand fields.

We also fully support incorporating introductory data analysis and coding skills in the K-12 curriculum (and there are some good approaches for doing so).  But we strongly disagree with marketing such skills as replacing foundational skills in algebra and calculus when preparing for 4-year college degrees in STEM and other quantitative fields. These topics are important and build on basic math foundations but are not a replacement for such foundations any more than social media skills can replace reading and writing foundations.

Given the above, we, together with more than 150 scientists, educators, and practitioners in STEM, have signed an open letter expressing our concerns with such trends. The signatories include STEM faculty in public and private universities and practitioners from industry. They include educators with decades of experience teaching students at all levels, as well as researchers that won the highest awards in their fields, including the Fields Medal and the Turing Award. Signers also include people vested in mathematical high-school education, such as Adrian Mims (founder of The Calculus Project) and Jelani Nelson (UC Berkeley EECS professor and founder of AddisCoder) who have spearheaded projects to increase access to underserved populations.

We encourage you to read the letter, and if you are a US-based STEM professional or educator, consider signing it as well: https://bit.ly/mathedletter

Unfortunately, in recent years, debates on US education have become politicized. The letter is not affiliated with any political organization, and we believe that the issues we highlight transcend current political debates. After all, expanding access to mathematical education is both socially just and economically wise.

Note: The above guest post reflects the views of its authors, Boaz Barak and Edith Cohen. Any comments below by them, me, or other signatories reflect their own views, not necessarily those of the entire group. –SA

### Two new talks and an interview

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021
1. A talk to UT Austin’s undergraduate math club (handwritten PDF notes) about Hao Huang’s proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture, and its implications for quantum query complexity and more. I’m still not satisfied that I’ve presented Huang’s beautiful proof as clearly and self-containedly as I possibly can, which probably just means I need to lecture on it a few more times.
2. A Zoom talk at the QPQIS conference in Beijing (PowerPoint slides), setting out my most recent thoughts about Google’s and USTC’s quantum supremacy experiments and the continuing efforts to spoof them classically.
3. An interview with me in Communications of the ACM, mostly about BosonSampling and the quantum lower bound for the collision problem.

Enjoy y’all!

### Scott Aaronson, when reached for comment, said…

Tuesday, November 16th, 2021

About IBM’s new 127-qubit superconducting chip: As I told New Scientist, I look forward to seeing the actual details! As far as I could see, the marketing materials that IBM released yesterday take a lot of words to say absolutely nothing about what, to experts, is the single most important piece of information: namely, what are the gate fidelities? How deep of a quantum circuit can they apply? How have they benchmarked the chip? Right now, all I have to go on is a stats page for the new chip, which reports its average CNOT error as 0.9388—in other words, close to 1, or terrible! (But see also a tweet by James Wootton, which explains that such numbers are often highly misleading when a new chip is first rolled out.) Does anyone here have more information? Update (11/17): As of this morning, the average CNOT error has been updated to 2%. Thanks to multiple commenters for letting me know!

About the Association for Mathematical Research: Last month, some colleagues invited me to join a brand-new society called the Association for Mathematical Research. Many of the other founders (Joel Hass, Abigail Thompson, Colin Adams, Richard Borcherds, Jeff Cheeger, Pavel Etingof, Tom Hales, Jeff Lagarias, Mark Lackenby, Cliff Taubes, …) were brilliant mathematicians who I admired, they seemed like they could use a bit of theoretical computer science representation, there was no time commitment, maybe they’d eventually do something good, so I figured why not? Alas, to say that AMR has proved unpopular on Twitter would be an understatement: it’s received the same contemptuous reception that UATX has. The argument seems to be: starting a new mathematical society, even an avowedly diverse and apolitical one, is really just an implicit claim that the existing societies, like the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS), have been co-opted by woke true-believers. But that’s paranoid and insane! I mean, it’s not as if an AMS blog has called for the mass resignation of white male mathematicians to make room for the marginalized, or the boycott of Israeli universities, or the abolition of the criminal justice system (what to do about Kyle Rittenhouse though?). Still, even though claims of that sort of co-option are obviously far-out, rabid fantasies, yeah, I did decide to give a new organization the benefit of the doubt. AMR might well fail or languish in obscurity, just like UATX might. On the other hand, the barriers to making a positive difference for the intellectual world, the world I love, the world under constant threat from the self-certain ideologues of every side, do strike me as orders of magnitude smaller for a new professional society than they do for a new university.

### Q2B 2021

Monday, November 1st, 2021

This is a quick post to let people know that the 2021 Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference will be this December 7-9 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. (Full disclosure: Q2B is hosted by QC Ware, Inc., to which I’m the scientific adviser.) Barring a dramatic rise in cases or the like, I’m planning to attend to do my Ask-Me-Anything session, in what’s become an annual tradition. Notably, this will be my first in-person conference, and in fact my first professional travel of any kind, since before covid shut down the US in late March 2020. I hope to see many of you there! And if you won’t be at Q2B, but you’ll be in the Bay Area and would like to meet otherwise, let me know and we’ll try to work something out.

### Welcome to scottaaronson.blog !

Thursday, October 21st, 2021

If you’ve visited Shtetl-Optimized lately — which, uh, I suppose you have — you may have noticed that your URL was redirected from www.scottaaronson.com/blog to scottaaronson.blog. That’s because Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, volunteered to move my blog there from Bluehost, free of charge. If all goes according to plan, you should notice faster loading times, less downtime, and hopefully nothing else different. Please let me know if you encounter any problems. And huge thanks to the WordPress.com Special Projects Team, especially Christopher Jones and Mark Drovdahl, for helping me out with this.