Dave Bacon
@dabacon.tachyon.institute
Theoretical ski bum. Former pseudo professor. Quantum bridge builder. Will math for food. mastodon: @dabacon@tachyon.channel https://dabacon.org
Lift one up in toast and sing the Cohen-Tannoudji song. www.lkb.fr/en/laboratoi...
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji has passed away - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel
lkb.fr
www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u... Neal Stephenson: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them."
Alpha School Claims to Teach Kids Twice as Fast. Many Don’t Make It. (Gift Article)
Alpha School, a private network, is spreading into public education. While its students’ test scores are high, some parents and educators say it doesn’t live up to the hype.
nytimes.com
Used the AI to package up all the talks, back when I used to talk. dabacon.github.io/talk_archive/ so many bad jokes
Dave Bacon — Historical Talk & Lecture Archive
dabacon.github.io
Ah finally got around to blocking the botnet that has been ddos-ing the old quantum pontiff blog. Not unexpectedly it is the "Dr. Wayne Dryer Makes Me Cry" post (2330 comments). Dr. Wayne continues, I guess, to make me cry.
I have a favorite memory of my time at Caltech seeing Jeffrey outside the Red Door, just happily sitting there calculating away on his notepad. The peacefulness of being lost in thought. physics.mit.edu/news/jeffrey...
Jeffrey Goldstone, pioneering theoretical physicist and MIT professor emeritus, dies at 93
The Physics Department is very sorry to report that our colleague Jeffrey Goldstone, Cecil and Ida Green Professor Emeritus of Physics, died on October 12 at the age of 93. Jeffrey began his career as...
physics.mit.edu
Big step closer to identifying conscious perception in the brain, by Doris Tsao and collaborators. 15 times a second your neurons flicker between conscious and unconscious activity. Consciousness is found in time, not in space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Rapid alternation of conscious and suppressed stimulus representations in the primate brain
The neural correlates of consciousness remain elusive [1]. Previous studies found that high-level visual cortex is weakly modulated by conscious perception [2,3], yet a pure signal of conscious percep...
biorxiv.org
Can you (or your agents) improve the super-quadratic separation between block sensitivity and sensitivity from the current bound of 2.05? The optimal exponent is between 2 and 4. My guess is 2.5 is achievable. Submit your lean-verified solutions here: prove2.me/campaigns/bl...
Block Sensitivity vs. Sensitivity · Prove2Me
How much larger can block sensitivity be than sensitivity for a total Boolean function? For a total Boolean function f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}, a block of coordina…
prove2.me
Finally, a good use case for an LLM: sort brute force search phrases by likelihood, in order to finally lay to rest one stupid conspiracy theory. I think @filippo had something on this? https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins
Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins
The decades-old mystery of the origins of one of the most popular cryptographic standards has been explained.
anthropic.com
I'm honored and excited to announce that this paper was selected to receive a Best Paper Award at FOCS 2026! Thanks to my coauthors Matt, Daochen, and Rain for including me in this work, and to the FOCS PC for selecting this despite it having a simple proof.
I'm looking for a new postdoc - details below.
Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford@inetoxford.bsky.social · last wk.Job opportunity! Post Doctoral Research Associate in Agent-Based Climate Macroeconomics @inet-complexity.bsky.social Work with @doynefarmer.bsky.social @drdonalbrown.bsky.social @ecioxford.bsky.social @smithschool.ox.ac.uk More info www.inet.ox.ac.uk/vacancies
I'm officially old "As observed long ago [5], exchange-only quantum computing inside a single N-spin DFS can support a Hilbert space that scales with N at almost the same rate as a quantum computer made of single-spin qubits!" where [5] equals work during my PhD arxiv.org/abs/2610.073...
Benchmarking exchange-only control of a 48-spin singlet manifold
Exchange-only quantum computing benefits from high fidelity and straightforward control afforded by the exchange interaction. However, independently controllable qubits must be encoded into subsystems...
arxiv.org
We know the answer now (for some definition of know…)
Maris Ozols@marisozols.bsky.social · 2w agoYou may finally rest easy at night since SICs exist in all dimensions! github.com/marozols/SIC... SICs are d² unit vectors in d complex dimensions with pairwise equal inner products. Their existences in all dimensions d was conjectured by Zauner in 1999. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIC-POVM
Who here is an expert in MUBs and has looked at OpenAI's paper? Does it look legit? github.com/openai/math/...
math/preprints/The-maximum-number-of-mutually-unbiased-bases-in-dimension-six-September-24-2026/The-maximum-number-of-mutually-unbiased-bases-in-dimension-six-September-24-2026.pdf at main · openai/ma...
Contribute to openai/math development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
dlyongemallo.bsky.social@dlyongemallo.bsky.social · 2w agoI seems I've been scooped by OpenAI. I was working on MUBs over the summer, but using a very different approach than "a swarm of agents". Instead, I took a "centaur" approach of leading a small team of research agents and trying to understand/verify each step: github.com/dlyongemallo...
Hilbert’s 12th problem for real quadratic fields is solved and thus SIC-POVM problem (Zauner's conjecture) is resolved! www.danrad.net/papers/stark...
danrad.net
Our results on single molecule spectroscopy have been published. This has been one of the major goals of our lab @uniinnsbruck.bsky.social ! A more detailed summary is given on our website: www.quantum-molecules.eu The full text is available open access at: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I’ve known about this for a couple of weeks, but now I can share: as of today, arXiv is rate-limiting submissions to two per month. And as a mod, I have to admit this is a necessary move (at least temporarily). blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/u...
Fair Moderation, Equitable Access, and AI: arXiv’s Updated Rate Limit Policy
arXiv, and the scientific community at large, are facing a watershed moment. Scholarly publishing is currently changing at a rapid pace, and we are seeing a…
blog.arxiv.org
Looks like a quantum computer
Helen Czerski@helenczerski.bsky.social · 3w agoTIL that it's 70 years since the first commercial hard drive shipped. It stored 3.75 Mb of data, and was two metres high. 70 years! Today there's > 200 zetabytes of stored data, nearly a billion billion times more. Has anyone found the Marie Kondo of data? www.computerhistory.org/storageengin...
Reminder for those submitting to QIP 2027: You must register your paper by the end of the day! This means you have to enter a title, abstract, list of authors, and select the topic area(s).
Wow, more progress on the Riemann zeta function! We know in our bones that for all positive integers n, ζ(n) = 1⁻ⁿ + 2⁻ⁿ + 3⁻ⁿ + ⋯ is irrational. But it's only been proved for n even, n = 3, .... and now, it seems, n = 5. This may seem small, but it's huge. zenodo.org/records/2282...
ζ(5) is irrational
We prove that ζ(5) is irrational. The proof constructs integer polynomials Qₙ of degree 37n with 0 < Qₙ(ζ(5)) < exp(−139n²/5) for all sufficiently large n. These polynomials are rationally normalized ...
zenodo.org
"This model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics." openai.com/index/adviso... terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/a... agmai.org
Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI is working with an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence to guide the review and communication of emerging AI results.
openai.com
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, turns into a Philip K Dick novel
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗@charlescmann.bsky.social · last mo.@tedgioia.bsky.social making the case that Philip K Dick's "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," one of his most bonkers novels when it came out in 1965, is now a work of social realism. www.honest-broker.com/p/my-favorit...
LAX is launching today, a way to connect natural mathematical language with Lean. They have a nice way to define complexity classes and can formalize some complexity results, for example nondeterministic space closed under complement
The Immerman–Szelepcsényi Theorem — lax-733996
Lax — an archive of formalized mathematical concepts and their proofs
laxarchive.org
Nice result! See end for interesting description of process using LLMs. Matches some of my experience as well.
Robin Kothari@robinkothari.bsky.social · last mo.Now on the arXiv: Shalev Ben-David and I (with the help of LLMs) show how a randomized algorithm can compute a total Boolean function faster than it is possible to certify the function! The full proof is < 3 pages. arxiv.org/abs/2609.15063 scirate.com/arxiv/2609.1...
“The first rule of the Intuition Club is: you don’t talk about the Intuition Club” davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
davidbessis.substack.com