An open science weblog focussed on quantum information theory, condensed matter physics, and mathematical physics
I learned the fundamentals of quantum information and computing from Michael Nielsen in 2002. I have actively kept pace with the field for over twenty years since then by publishing, teaching, supervising, consulting, and building. During this time I have never, not even once, been tempted to use a quantum programming language. The language of […]
If you are at all connected with academic circles it would have been hard to miss the announcement: OpenAI has just published Ten advances in mathematics, ten results in mathematics and theoretical computer science, author listed simply as “OpenAI”, accompanied by Lean certificates on GitHub, and, per Noam Brown, a token bill of under $2K […]
I have been thinking a lot about how social dynamics are going to shift in the new era of cognitive abundance. I don’t pretend to have any kind of crystal ball, but there are numerous historical precedents for what happens when you provide a new resource practically for free. A bit less superficially, the study […]
There has been a bit of excitement recently as LLMs have been delivering consequential results in mathematics. First the headline result in May that the unit distance conjecture had been refuted, and just now Fable was prompted into apparently disproving the Jacobian conjecture. During the World Cup final. In a tweet. Erdős conjectures have become […]
I recently had an enlightening conversation with Rob May and Yash Sharma of NeuroMetric.ai about adversarial verification protocols. Their insightful questions forced me to crystallise something I’d been circling for a while: why frontier models perform so much better at undergraduate mathematics than research-level work. (I assure you, the only “PhD smarts” they have is […]
I am extremely conflicted about the current state of AI technology: I am not a breathless convert to the AI revolution. I have resisted and remained deeply skeptical of AI tools and LLMs for years. If you’ve read my other posts, you might have the impression I’m uncritically enthusiastic about this technology. In narrow, specific […]
Frontier large language models from, e.g., OpenAI and Anthropic are completely reorganising the landscape of knowledge work. Indeed, higher education will not escape: the daily evolving arms race between assessment design and chatbot use is in full swing. You can bet I have a lot to say about this, but that is for another day. […]
Here you can find the pdf copy of the notes I wrote during the video
This summer semester (2021) I am giving a course on General Relativity (GR). This course is intended for theorists with familiarity with special relativity (a must) and basic physics. I will be making the lecture notes produced during these videos available here: You can find the videos for this course at the following playlist:
In 2017 Reinhard Werner gave a series of lectures on the mathematical methods of quantum information theory at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. These lectures were recorded and I have the pleasure of hosting these videos on my youtube channel. Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting these lectures there. The playlist of all of these […]