Tom Gur

We’re hiring in Cambridge CS! Assistant/Associate Professor position in AI and machine learning, including learning theory and related areas of theoretical computer science. Apply here: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

U. Colorado Boulder Mathematics is hiring for two tenure-track faculty positions: 1 open area jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta... due Nov 15 1 at the interface of AI + math jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta... due Nov 11 Please help spread the word! #MathSky #AcademicSky

Nominations for the 2026 IEEE/Computer Society TCMF Distinguished Service Award are now open! Given "in recognition of outstanding, dedicated, and indispensable service to the [Theory of Computation] community." tc.computer.org/tcmf/2026/10... Deadline: ⏰ Nov 2

Many people with relevant expertise think there's a real chance that AI could kill us all in the not too distant future. Others disagree. I've written a post, aimed principally at mathematicians, detailing my struggles to decide what to make of this. gowers.wordpress.com/2026/10/16/h...

The submission server for #STOC2027 is open! stoc27.hotcrp.com Submission instructions and Call for Paper: acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/sto...

I wrote a blog post on "TCS, AI, and the Adults in the Room," addressed to the senior researchers and established academics in our field: minorfree.github.io/Clement/ Thanks to @hunglv.bsky.social for lending me his blog!

I really like Raghu Meka's post about the barriers of perception. It's thought-provoking and well worth a read. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/t...

We're excited that our researchers @tomgur.bsky.social @martin.kleppmann.com & Amanda Prorok are receiving funding from the @aria-research.bsky.social 'Scaling Trust' programme to lead teams exploring ambitious new ways of improving #AI security. Read about their projects here: shorturl.at/8K1ck

Moni Naor is awarded the Knuth Prize, for his incredible body of work, spanning cryptography, pseudorandomness, algorithms, and much more! tc.computer.org/tcmf/2026/10... h/t @gautamkamath.com

If you're in #TheoreticalCS and on the postdoc job market, now or soon: this opportunity to work with Tom Gur (@tomgur.bsky.social) on "cutting-edge research on the interplay of theoretical computer science, mathematics, and quantum mechanics" sounds amazing: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/researc...

Goldreich’s short take on AI proofs is thought-provoking (and the Borges reference is quite on point). www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/on-pro...

Am teaching grad complexity theory at CMU; about 1/3 of the lectures will be new (vs. last time), 'modern' results. Videos are going onto www.youtube.com/@ComplexityT... which will later also feature student videos. We did Williams (/Cook-Mertz/Shalunov) TIME(t) in SPACE(~√t) today.

Recruiting: We're hiring two Associate Professorships or Professorships of Computer Science (with Tutorial Fellowships) to start on 1 September 2027 as part of the University of Oxford’s @ox.ac.uk expansion in Computer Science. Details & applications: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

TCS+, the longest-running theoretical #computerscience seminar, will soon resume for the Fall. Let us know what you'd like to hear about (results, speakers, topics), and any suggestions you may have! sites.google.com/view/tcsplus... #TCSSky @tcsplus.bsky.social

Let's have a community discussion about the impact of LLMs on quantum information research, and how to react to it as a research community! 👩‍🔬⚛️🤖 🏛️ Head over to the IAQI forum 👇 discuss.iaqi.org/t/quantum-in... 🦋 Please share widely!

The website and registration link for WoLA 2026, the Workshop on Local Algorithms, is up! Registration is free, and the workshop will take place on August 16-18 at Boston University. Details and registration: www.local-algorithms.com/WOLA2026/

5-year postdoctoral research fellowship in theoretical Computer Science (also 4 other research fields), a nice opportunity! Needs PhD to be awarded between 1/Aug/24 and 1/Oct/27. Please share with whoever may be suitable! www.asc.ox.ac.uk/post-doctora...

Oded Goldreich posted a very insightful digest of the interactive proofs of proximity paper by Rothblum, Vadhan, and Wigderson. This is one of my favourite TCS papers, and Oded's new exposition makes it even easier to appreciate its beauty and elegance. eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2026/...

Splendid news for TCS@Cambridge: Anuj Dawar @anujdawar.bsky.social has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society. A wonderful recognition for a towering figure in logic and computational complexity. Many congratulations, Anuj! www.cst.cam.ac.uk/news/royal-s...

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

Superb exposition. Highly recommended!

Congratulations to Scott Aaronson, awarded the inaugural Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science "for his sustained and high-impact inspirational efforts to explain and promote our field to broad audiences"! Read the commendation: sigact.org/prizes/trevi... #TCSSky

How did I miss this?! A recent (2025) survey by Rocco Servedio on PAC learning and its variants, and recent results in these learning models: arxiv.org/abs/2511.08791 (Anything by Rocco is worth reading!)

Excited about this new paper: it subsumes the quadratic Goldreich-Levin [BC26] and algorithmic PFR [ACDG26] papers, and makes explicit a connection between quadratic Fourier analysis and symplectic geometry, as speculated by Green and Tao. arxiv.org/abs/2604.04547

Submissions are now open for RANDOM 2026: easychair.org/conferences/... Call for papers: randomconference.com/random-2026-... RANDOM 2026 will be held in Boston, MA, on August 19–21, 2026, together with APPROX 2026. We look forward to your submissions!

📢 Our next TCS+ talk of the season will be Wednesday, April 8 (10am PT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CEST): Rahul Ilango, from MIT, will tell us about Gödel in Cryptography! RSVP to receive the link (available one day prior to the talk): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Postdoc position in Cambridge with the amazing Anuj Dawar!

I've created a couple of mathematical games, both based on word problems in groups or semigroups. One of them could lead to a Polymath project if enough people are interested in it, as it is connected with an open problem. More details in the linked blog post.

Happy days! A perfect excuse to share my favourite quantum cryptography origin story, as recounted in Brassard’s paper: arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph...

A quantum computer here at Cambridge!

I’ve been enjoying Dor Minzer’s new survey “The Lens of Abelian Embeddings”. It gives a clear, additive-combinatorics-flavoured perspective on inverse theorems for k-wise correlations, with applications in discrete maths/TCS and plenty of open problems. arxiv.org/abs/2602.22183

Postdoc position in Cambridge with Julia Wolf: Julia is a phenomenal researcher and a wonderful collaborator. She is advertising a 2-year postdoc in additive combinatorics and model theory. Closing date: 16 March. Details: jobs.ac.uk/job/DQP803/postdoctoral-research-associate-fixed-term

The 2nd Quantum Cambridge–Oxford–Warwick (QCOW) Workshop will take place at Warwick on April 23–24. Theme: Quantum Learning Theory. The programme will feature tutorials and accessible in-depth talks on recent advances by leading experts. Speakers/updates: qcow.cs.ox.ac.uk/

The list of accepted papers at #STOC2026 is out: acm-stoc.org/stoc2026/acc... Congratulations to all authors!

Theoretical CS community! I have a small favor to ask. If you ever used, read, watched some of the (excellent IMO) exposition content by Ryan O'Donnell, would you mind filling this very short survey, and maybe say how useful to you it was? 📝 forms.gle/xrvc2mLRbMqK... Please spread this! #TCSSky

Congrats to Irit Dveer Dinur of the Institute for Advanced Study & Weizmann Insitute, #NASmember Subhash Khot of New York University, Guy Kindler of @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social, Dor Minzer of @mit.edu, and Muli Safra of Tel Aviv University, winners of the 2026 Michael and Sheila Held Prize! (1/2)

ICALP 2026 CFP is out. This year it’ll be at Royal Holloway (London area), July 7–10, 2026. Abstract registration: Feb 3 Paper deadline: Feb 6 Details: icalppodcspaa2026.cs.rhul.ac.uk/icalp/

New paper with the brilliant Dor Minzer, Guy Weissenberg, and Kai Zhe Zheng: we show a separation between RLDCs and LDCs via HDX-based PCPs. This one is special to me; it answers a question Oded Goldreich posed to me in my 1st PhD year, and it’s been on my mind ever since. arxiv.org/pdf/2512.129...

Reminder: Two weeks left to apply for the Assistant/Associate Professor positions in Theoretical Computer Science at Cambridge. Application deadline: 15 December 2025. Details and application portal: cst.cam.ac.uk/assistantass...

Wow! Yuansi Chen resolves 1 of the 2 remaining $1000 Talagrand problems (michel.talagrand.net/prizes/prize... ): If you take any f : {-1,+1}ⁿ → ℝ⁺ and apply the noise operator T_{.99}, the resulting function g = T_{.99} f satisfies a better-than-Markov inequality. That is, Pr[g > t E[g]] < o(1/t).

A new paper with the brilliant Guy Goldberg and Sidhant Saraogi (now on the job market!). We prove nearly tight lower bounds for relaxed LDCs via a new combinatorial notion of relaxed sunflowers with pseudorandom structure, obtained from new spread lemmas. eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2025/...

Join us for the first Quantum Cambridge–Oxford–Warwick Colloquium (Quantum COW, if you insist...), 11–12 December 2025 at the University of Oxford. This meeting focuses on Quantum Low-Depth Complexity, with talks, tutorials, and open discussions. Details: qcow.cs.ox.ac.uk

Reminder: the School of Computer Science at #USyd is hiring across the board, equiv. tenure-track positions! Join us at @sydney.edu.au! Deadline ⏰ December 1 🇦🇺

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...

The inaugural Computational Complexity Conference Test of Time Award seeks nominations (deadline Monday, March 2, 2026). Help us select an awesome paper for this award! computationalcomplexity.org/tot/tot26.html

I’m looking for postdocs and PhD students to join my group at Cambridge! Topics include: Classical & Quantum Complexity, Sublinear Algorithms, Coding Theory, Cryptography, Learning Theory, and their interplay with Fourier Analysis & Additive Combinatorics. To apply or inquire, email me your CV.