Dear quanta, See below for a message from Boaz Barak about a class many of you might find interesting. ---------------------------- Hi all, I will be teaching (or more accurately, learning) in the Fall on Fridays 1:15-4:30 a graduate seminar on physics and computation, see https://www.boazbarak.org/fall18seminar/ This will replace the Friday theory reading group in the fall. Some topics we could look into include (in no particular order): - connections between statistical physics and algorithms. - black holes, bulk/boundary correspondence, and computational complexity. - quantum information theory: quantum-inspired classical results, as well as classical algorithms for quantum problems. - quantum hamiltonian complexity: "quantum PCP theorem", quantum analogs of constraint satisfaction problems - complexity evidence for "quantum superiority" - the "conformal bootstrap" - exploring the space of possible physical theories using semidefinite programming. though am happy to get other suggestions as well. The goal is to find among these topics the results to present that give the maximum amount of insights and connections to computer science with the minimum amount of physics background (which we will not assume). I hope many of you will participate so we can learn together about some of these fascinating topics. In particular, I hope that many Harvard and MIT grad students take this seminar as a course for credit. (If enough MIT students do so, and an appropriate room is available, we might rotate it weekly between Harvard and MIT as we do in the reading group.) For planning purposes, if you are thinking of taking this seminar for credit, or even regularly attending it, I would appreciate it if you join the Piazza forum at https://piazza.com/harvard/fall2018/cs229r Best, Boaz _______________________________________________ qip mailing list qip(a)mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/qip