Every week, I tell myself I won\u2019t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No one on earth\u2014certainly<\/em> no one who reads this blog\u2014could call me blas\u00e9 about the issue of antisemitism at US universities. I’ve blasted the takeover of entire departments and unrelated student clubs and campus common areas by the dogmatic belief that the State of Israel (and only<\/em> Israel, among all nations on earth) should be eradicated, by the use of that belief as a litmus test for entry. Since October 7, I’ve dealt with comments and emails pretty much every day calling me a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I hope it means something when I say: today I salute Harvard for standing up to the Trump administration<\/em>. And I\u2019ll say so in person, when I visit Harvard’s math department later this week to give the Fifth Annual Yip Lecture<\/a>, on \u201cHow Much Math Is Knowable?\u201d The more depressing the news, I find, the more my thoughts turn to the same questions that bothered Euclid and Archimedes and Leibniz and Russell and Turing. Actually, what the hell, why don’t I share the abstract for this talk?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws. I’ll tell a story that starts with G\u00f6del’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability. I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function. Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear and Riebel, has shown that the value of BB(745) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870. I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors. I’ll next discuss the P\u2260NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence. As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable. I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Now back to the depressing news. What makes me take Harvard’s side is the experience of Columbia. Columbia had already been moving in the right direction on fighting antisemitism, and on enforcing its rules against disruption, before the government even got involved. Then, once the government did<\/em> take away funding and present its ultimatum—completely outside the process specified in Title VI law—Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked, to howls of outrage from the left-leaning faculty. Yet despite its total capitulation,<\/strong> the government has continued<\/em> to hold Columbia\u2019s medical research and other science funding hostage, while inventing a never-ending list of additional demands, whose apparent endpoint is that Columbia submit to state ideological control like a university in Russia or Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By taking this scorched-earth route, the government has effectively telegraphed to all the other<\/em> universities, as clearly as possible: \u201cactually, we don\u2019t care what you do or don\u2019t do on antisemitism. We just want to destroy you, and antisemitism was our best available pretext, the place where you\u2019d most obviously fallen short of your ideals. But we\u2019re not really trying to cure a sick patient, or force the patient to adopt better health habits: we\u2019re trying to shoot, disembowel, and dismember the patient. That being the case, you might as well fight us and go down with dignity!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n No wonder that my distinguished Harvard friends (and past Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> guest bloggers) Steven Pinker<\/a> and Boaz Barak<\/a>\u2014not exactly known as anti-Zionist woke radicals\u2014have come out in favor of Harvard fighting this in court. So has Harvard’s past president Larry Summers<\/a>, who’s welcome to guest-blog here as well. They all understand that events have given us no choice but to fight Trump as if there were no antisemitism, even while we continue to fight antisemitism as if there were no Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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