The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

While the jury is still out as to whether the impressive experimental progress on quantum gates and qubits will lead one day to a full scale quantum computing machine, a new and exciting development has been taking place over the past decade. Computational notions such as reductions, hardness, and completeness are quickly starting to be integrated into the very heart of the research of many body quantum systems. The computational perspective brings deep new insights into physical questions that seem completely unrelated to computers, spanning precision measurements, testing quantum mechanics at large scales, and even black holes and quantum gravity. These physics questions are now being addressed using notions coming from the land of TCS: PCPs, error correcting codes and interactive proofs. I will try to explain some of these intriguing connections, and time permitting, will ponder about what next. Short Bio: ========== Dorit Aharonov graduated from Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a BSc in Mathematics and Physics in 1994. She then graduated from Weizmann Institute of Science with an MSc in Physics. She received her doctorate for Computer Science in 1999 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her thesis was entitled "Noisy Quantum Computation." She also did her post-doctorate in the mathematics department of Princeton University, and in the computer science department of University of California Berkeley. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1998-99. In 2005, Aharonov was profiled by the journal Nature as one of four "young theorists... who are making waves in their chosen fields.", and in the following year, she then received the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research. She was an invited speaker in International Congress of Mathematicians 2010, in Hyderabad on the topic of "Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science."