Archive for September, 2012

Two quick announcements

Saturday, September 8th, 2012

The Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences (PGSS) was an incredibly-successful summer program for gifted high school students in my birth-state of Pennsylvania.  PGSS ran from 1982 to 2009 and then was shuttered due to state budget cuts.  A group of alumni is now trying to raise enough private funds to restart the program (they need $100,000).  Please visit their site, watch their video, and make a small (or large) donation if you feel moved to.

In other news, I’ll be speaking at a workshop on Quantum Information Science in Computer and Natural Sciences, organized by Umesh Vazirani and Carl Williams, to be held September 28-29 at the University of Maryland College Park.  This workshop is specifically designed for computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and others who haven’t worked in quantum information, but who’d like to know more about current research in the area, and to look for connections between quantum information and their own fields.  Umesh writes:

The initiative comes at a particularly opportune moment for researchers in complexity theory, given the increasing relevance of quantum techniques in complexity theory — the 2-4 norm paper of Barak, et al (SDPs, Lasserre), exponential lower bounds for TSP polytope via quantum communication complexity arguments (de Wolf et al), quantum Hamiltonian complexity as a generalization of  CSPs, lattice-based cryptography whose security is based on quantum arguments, etc.
Hope to see some of you there!