Complexity Zoo
| Scott Joel Aaronson | |
|---|---|
Scott Joel Aaronson
|
|
| Born |
May 21, 1981 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Computational complexity theory, Quantum Computing |
| Institutions |
University of Texas at Austin Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study University of Waterloo |
| Alma mater |
Cornell University University of California, Berkeley |
| Doctoral advisor | Umesh Vazirani |
| Known for |
Quantum Turing with postselection Algebrization |
| Notable awards |
Alan T. Waterman Award PECASE |
Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) is a theoretical computer scientist. His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.
Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father—a science writer turned public-relations executive—was posted to Hong Kong. He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers. He enrolled in a program for gifted youngsters run by Clarkson University, which enabled Aaronson to apply for colleges while only in his freshman year of high school. He was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani. He is an atheist.
Aaronson had shown ability in mathematics from an early age, teaching himself calculus at the age of 11, provoked by symbols in a babysitter's textbook. He discovered computer programming at age 11, and felt he lagged behind peers, who had already been coding for years. Partly for this reason, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity. At Cornell, he became interested in quantum computing, and devoted himself to computational complexity and quantum computing.
After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. His primary area of research is quantum computing and computational complexity theory more generally.
In the summer of 2016 he moved from MIT to the University of Texas at Austin as David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science and as the founding director of UT Austin's new quantum computing center.
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