Scott Aaronson

Early life and education

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 The Clarkson School, a gifted education program 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, and where he resided at the Telluride House. He then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani.

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. In part due to Aaronson getting into advanced mathematics before getting into computer programming, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity theory. At Cornell, he became interested in quantum computing and devoted himself to computational complexity and quantum computing.

Career

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 Information Center. In summer 2022 he announced he would be working for a year at OpenAI on theoretical foundations of AI safety. He worked at the company for two years.

Popular work

He is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity. He is the author of the blog "Shtetl-Optimized".

In a Scientific American interview he answers why his blog is called shtetl-optimized, and explains his preoccupation with the past:

He also wrote the essay "Who Can Name The Bigger Number?". The latter work, widely distributed in academic computer science, uses the concept of Busy Beaver Numbers as described by Tibor Radó to illustrate the limits of computability in a pedagogic environment.

He has also taught a graduate-level survey course, "Quantum Computing Since Democritus", for which notes are available online, and have been published as a book by Cambridge University Press. It weaves together disparate topics into a cohesive whole, including quantum mechanics, complexity, free will, time travel, the anthropic principle and more. Many of these interdisciplinary applications of computational complexity were later fleshed out in his article, "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity". Since then, Aaronson published a book entitled Quantum Computing Since Democritus based on the course.

An article of Aaronson's, "The Limits of Quantum Computers", was published in Scientific American, and he was a guest speaker at the 2007 Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference. Aaronson is frequently cited in the non-academic press, such as Science News, The Age, ZDNet, Slashdot, New Scientist, The New York Times, and Forbes magazine.

Awards

• Aaronson is one of two winners of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award.
• Best Student Paper Awards at the Computational Complexity Conference for the papers "Limitations of Quantum Advice and One-Way Communication" (2004) and "Quantum Certificate Complexity" (2003).
• Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at the Symposium on Theory of Computing for the paper "Lower Bounds for Local Search by Quantum Arguments" (2004).
• 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
• 2009 Sloan Research Fellowship
• 2017 Simons Investigator
• He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to quantum computing and computational complexity".
• He was awarded the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing "for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing".

Personal life

Aaronson is married to computer scientist Dana Moshkovitz. Aaronson is Jewish, and has described himself as "radicalized in my Jewish and Zionist identities".

References

References

1. (2008). "Scott Aaronson".
2. "Professor Scott Aaronson".
3. Hardesty, Larry. (April 7, 2014). "The complexonaut". mit.edu.
4. [http://www.scottaaronson.com/vita.pdf CV] from Aaronson's web site
5. (December 5, 2017). "Quickies".
6. {{mathgenealogy
7. Shetl-Optimized, [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2620 "From Boston to Austin"], February 28, 2016.
8. (2022). "OpenAI is developing a watermark to identify work from its GPT text AI". New Scientist.
9. (June 17, 2022). "OpenAI!".
10. Goldman, Sharon. (October 8, 2025). "How former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsize influence from Silicon Valley to D.C.". [[Fortune (magazine).
11. ''Automata, Computability and Complexity'' by [[Elaine Rich]] (2008) {{isbn
12. [https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo The Complexity Zoo page] (originally) at [[Qwiki]] (a quantum physics wiki, [[Stanford University]])
13. "Shtetl-Optimized". scottaaronson.com.
14. "Scott Aaronson Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question I Throw at Him".
15. Aaronson, Scott. "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?". Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT.
16. "PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus". scottaaronson.com.
17. "Quantum Computing Democritus :: Quantum physics, quantum information and quantum computation". cambridge.org.
18. Aaronson, Scott. (2011). "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity".
19. Aaronson, Scott. (February 2008). "The Limits of Quantum Computers". Scientific American.
20. (August 18, 2007). "Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference". [[Citadel Media.
21. Peterson, Ivars. (November 20, 1999). "Quantum Games". Science Service.
22. Franklin, Roger. (November 17, 2002). "Two-digit theory gets two fingers". The Age.
23. Judge, Peter. (November 9, 2007). "D-Wave's quantum computer ready for latest demo". [[CNET]].
24. Dawson, Keith. (November 29, 2008). "Improving Wikipedia Coverage of Computer Science". Slashdot.
25. Brooks, Michael. (March 31, 2007). "Outside of time: The quantum gravity computer". New Scientist.
26. Pontin, Jason. (April 8, 2007). "A Giant Leap Forward in Computing? Maybe Not". The New York Times.
27. Gomes, Lee. (December 12, 2008). "Your World View Doesn't Compute". Forbes.
28. link. (July 8, 2021 , [[National Science Foundation]], March 8, 2012, retrieved March 8, 2012.)
29. Aaronson, Scott. (2004). "Limitations of Quantum Advice and One-Way Communication".
30. Aaronson, Scott. (2003). "Quantum Certificate Complexity".
31. "Future and Past Conferences". Computational Complexity Conference.
32. "Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award". ACM.
33. "The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers: Recipient Details: Scott Aaronson". NSF.
34. (February 17, 2009). "Six junior faculty named Sloan Research Fellows".
35. [https://www.simonsfoundation.org/mathematics-physical-sciences/simons-investigators/simons-investigators-awardees/ Simons Investigators Awardees], The Simons Foundation
36. "2019 ACM Fellows Recognized for Far-Reaching Accomplishments that Define the Digital Age". Association for Computing Machinery.
37. "2020". Association for Computing Machinery.
38. (February 16, 2023). "Statement of Jewish scientists opposing the "judicial reform" in Israel".
39. "Statement of concern – Signatories".
40. (November 13, 2022). "The International Olympiad in Injustice".
41. (September 26, 2024). "The International Olympiad in Injustice".