Many face to face activities are now resuming. Last week I took part in a great conference on high dimensional expanders at the Simons Foundation, I recently gave real life talks with large audiences also in U. Chicago and Rutgers, and next week I talk here at the Courant colloquium. In these times when people hesitate about attending in-door activities and some of these activities are restricted, I decided to prepare a 20-minute introduction for every in-person talk, and in this post I will share with with my recent three introductory talks. The lectures themselves (blackboard-lectures in all these cases) are self-contained and do not depend on the introductory videos. The Zoom era also offers new opportunities like a talk I gave a few weeks ago in the John-Conway spirited seminar at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan.
An invitation to the NYU Courant colloquium
Title: Noise sensitivity, Fourier, and the quantum computer puzzle
Speaker: Gil Kalai, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Reichman University and NYU
Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302
Date: Monday, November 8, 2021, 3:45 p.m.
Synopsis: I will start with the analysis of Boolean functions and the related theory of noise stability and noise sensitivity. Next, I will discuss the sensitivity of noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers, and explain why NISQ computers are computationally primitive and incapable of demonstrating neither “quantum computational advantage” nor the harder task of quantum error-correction. Finally, I will briefly discuss recent papers claiming a huge quantum computational advantage for NISQ systems which appears to be in sharp contrast with my theory.
Introductory video: click here.; Here is the presentation; Here is the colloquium page.
I plan to give a blackboard talk. The title is very similar to my ICM 2018 lecture except that a lot has happened since 2018.
Two other introductory videotaped:
- Helly-type problems with emphasis on the cascade conjecture
- Problems about convex polytopes (see this post)
My lecture in Lahore
My lecture in LUMS, was entitled “A word devoid of quantum computers with emphasis on predictability and free will”. Here is the presentation and here is the seminar page with links to the video recording (and to other interesting lectures). The lecture is related to this post on quantum computers and free will.
The last slide of the NYU introductory presentation. (I plan a blackboard lecture.)
At the end I gave a presentation. Here are the slides for the full representation. Apparently it was the first live Courant colloquium after almost two years.
Picture: Vlad Vicol
Picture: Deane Young