Quantum course tidbit #4 youtube.com/watch?v=Wv83nz…: I often rename Hadamard to "Add & Dif". Applying it to qubit in state (x,y) takes you to (x+y,x-y). (Remember, we're cool with unnormalized states.) I feel this has somewhat more intuition / is more memorable. I *also* often

Quantum course tidbit #7: youtube.com/playlist?list=… There's almost no linear algebra in the course. Arguably, you just need to know how to add and subtract vectors. What linear algebra there is, I prefer to call "geometry". (Even matrix multiplication is "paths diagrams".)

Quantum course tidbit #8: youtube.com/playlist?list=… There're also no complex numbers in my quantum course. Of course I tell the students that qubit amplitudes 𝒄𝒂𝒏 be complex, but we never use them in any of our algorithms. (Yes, we do the Factoring algorithm in 100% detail!)

Probably the largest set of different home countries I've gotten the chance to lecture to. :) Thanks to Jan Hązła and the rest of African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) for inviting me to participate!

Quantum course tidbit #9: So if there are no complex numbers in the course, how do we do Shor's Algorithm? We don't; we do Kitaev's version of the Factoring algorithm, which just uses Phase Estimation. Well, not Phase Estimation, but "Rotation Estimation" as we call it, since

Final quantum course tidbit #10: In the course, we do Grover's algorithm (i.e., SAT in (√2)ⁿ quantum time) before doing the Factoring algorithm. Always seems funny to me that most courses do them in the other order. (Why is this? To follow the historical order?) Not only

In case you're in the Boston area, I'll talk about "Quartic quantum speedups for planted inference" tomorrow (Sep. 13) at Harvard at 4pm. This is at the Freedman CSMA Seminar. cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/event/freedman…

I just posted the 100th and final video in my YouTube course, "Quantum Computer Programming in 100 Easy Lessons". If you're interested in learning quantum computing, and you have some 100 consecutive days with a half-hour free, maybe check it out :-) youtube.com/playlist?list=…

Student I know wants to apply for a PhD program doing quantum computing. But she also wants to be in the *math* department. My brain couldn't do the lookup "QC person but in Math dept." Any suggestions for universities having such a person? Diverse suggestions (by DM) welcome!🙏

In case you're in Cambridge, MA on Tue. Dec. 10, I'll give a talk at 4pm (MIT 32-G449) about coboundary expansion in high-dimensional expanders. It's kind of about group theory, though. toc.csail.mit.edu/node/1671 Besides coauthor Noah Singer, here's the cast of characters:

New w/ Meghal Gupta, William He, Ryan O'Donnell arxiv.org/abs/2508.09422 We give a quadratically faster classical algo for noisy planted kXOR (k > large const), dispelling (for now) claimed quartic speedup for quantum algos. 🧵 (1/10)