Shtetl-Optimized

I’ve been getting emails from journalists asking me to comment on the new White House executive order on quantum computing. Alas, I don’t have time for a long response or interviews since I’m at a beautiful scie...

Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Last week, five authors posted a major paper to the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, wh...

In 2024, at the same time as I was being called a genocide apologist, Zionist baby killer, etc. etc., I was also being hounded by my right-wing, pro-Israel readers, who demanded of me: knowing what you know, understanding what you understand, how could you possibly vote for Kamala Harris? How could you donate to Kamala’s campaign, urge your readers to vote f...

The comments on my previous post, on recent AI breakthroughs in solving Erdös problems and beyond, must’ve set some sort of record for the number of separate reasons commenters offered me to despair about the future of humanity. All this in a post that I saw as relatively ner...

As most readers have presumably heard by now, Paul Erdös’s Unit Distance Problem from 1946—one of the central open problems from the field of discrete geometry—