- Paper 488 claims to prove P = NP. Paper 872 claims to prove P != NP. At least one is wrong! (My wager: both) - 339 submissions have only one author, 286 different authors have at least one solo-author paper. About half these authors have never published in STOC/FOCS/SODA before

We are hiring four PhD students to work on various aspects of digital identity wallets: 1. Quantum-safe verifiable credentials 2. Privacy-Preserving Digital Wallets 3. Information Systems 4. Security culture, trust and society in in the age of digital identity www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Cryptology and Social Life (311003) | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Job title: Cryptology and Social Life (311003), Employer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Deadline: Friday, November 20, 2026

jobbnorge.no

Internships! The CISPA Summer Research program offers BSc or MSc students a 2-3 month paid research internship to work alongside world-leading researchers in cryptography, computer security, privacy, and machine learning/AI! Want to work with us next Summer? Apply here: career.cispa.de/internship

Research internships | CISPA Career

The CISPA Summer Research (CSR) program offers BSc or MSc students a 2-3 month paid research internship to work alongside world-leading researchers in cryptography, computer security, privacy, and mac...

career.cispa.de

We are looking for a postdoc to work at the intersection of cryptography, privacy, and machine learning at Aarhus University. More info at iacr.org/jobs/item/4287

We have a few stipends for early career researchers to attend the workshop "Isogenies Of Abelian Varieties: Applications To Post-Quantum Cryptography” at the Bernoulli Center EPFL, 16–20 November 2026. bernoulli-isogeny.github.io Apply before Oct 28!

Some reflections on AI in math. I found it helpful to simply list out the various parts of what a mathematician does, why math is valuable, and where the funding comes from. From there, what happens if AI gets more capable? youtu.be/LKrwhjOI8Nc

There's never been a better time to go into math

YouTube video by 3Blue1Brown

youtu.be

Virginia's writing is very informative! She and Josh received the original (shitty) proof from Anthropic's internal model, but she could easily reproduce it using her own old proposed strategy and <2 hours of publicly available Claude.

Hung Le@hunglv.bsky.social · 3w ago

Virginia Vassilevska Williams reflected on the recent 3SUM and APSP: people.csail.mit.edu/virgi/though...

We should also keep track of the number of AI-generated results desk-rejected from conferences and journals due to being of subpar quality, to help keep things in perspective. "OpenAI announces 722 desk-rejections from leading scientific venues!" would not have the same ring, I know.

Guest blog by me

This is normal bad work

[This is a guest post by Sophie Huiberts, being an expanded version of a post on her own blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Wh…

terrytao.wordpress.com

"The apparent complete lack of care to do undergraduate-level code clean-up is striking, even if the code compiles ok. One can then perhaps extrapolate to the quality of the English writing that the system has put out."

theHigherGeometer@highergeometer.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 3w ago

I felt like I had come to a place to actually say something worth saying about last week's dump of AI-generated claimed results. https://thehighergeometer.wordpress.com/2026/10/12/what-even-is-mathematical-output/

As you get older, you realize the importance of having a large amount of shallow bowls in which to put small amounts of discrete objects

I Wrote about the responsibility we carry to each other.

Someone on Reddit knows about my papers??

Reminder: the Call for Contributed Talks for Real World Crypto 2027 closes Oct 15. If you've built, deployed, broken, measured, or learned something the community should hear about, submit it (abstract up to 3 pages). rwc.iacr.org/2027/contrib...

This point regarding AI-produced proofs is of course not new, but is beautifully put here. www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-en... @quantamagazine.org

A very important message from Omer Reingold to our TCS community, especially us (arg, already) senior researchers: "snap out of it." Please, digest, and share. theorydish.blog/2026/09/29/s...

I'd like to remind IACR members to sign up for discuss.iacr.org so they can participate in the discussion about how to adapt the society to the new world of publishing and conferences. If you don't have an account you can visit iacr.org/discuss/

STOC call for papers is out. Deadline is November 2. acm-stoc.org/stoc202... New rules for the AI era: limited submissions, public posting and a required video. Is it a coincidence that the camera-ready deadline is April Fools Day?

“Now Lean, particularly in Navier-Stokes papers, is being used as a time-stamp, a way to claim your theorem before having to write it up properly in an explainable way.” A sentence that would’ve been seen as the ravings of a madman just ~1 year ago. blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/09/navi...

It is time for possible Dagstuhl proposals again! Proposals can be submitted between October 15 and November 1, 2026. For links to guidelines, more details on the process, and important dates see www.dagstuhl.de/en/institute...

My colleague Marc found a 20-line Lean ”proof” of Fermat’s last theorem that really fits in the margin! 😁 blog.trailofbits.com/2026/09/09/a...

A “proof” of Fermat’s Last Theorem that fits the margin

Fermat’s margin was too narrow for his proof. Ours would have fit just fine, thanks to a wonderfully cursed Lean bug.

blog.trailofbits.com

Fantastic thread on math’s over-indexing on problem solving but applies to theoretical CS and crypto as well (in fact I think TCS and crypto are worse than math in this regard). Took me a few years after my PhD to converge to this viewpoint as well but I always thought I was just odd

Gro-Tsen@gro-tsen.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Let me expand upon this 🔽 and say something about AIs, mathematics, proofs, conjectures, problem-solving, goalposts, paperclips, genii and, more importantly, Campbell/Goodhart's law. 🧵⤵️ •1/38

I kinda consider this a soft confession to what I was theorising 1) He admits they only care about maths in so far as it brings good PR 2) they're only interested in announcing results that make it sound like they're gonna replace mathematicians ∴) they're optimising for impressive-soundingness

🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə)@timhenke.bsky.social · 6mo ago

I think if I were an AI company trying to create a perception that AIs were going to replace mathematicians, what I would do is grab a large set of high-profile open problems and just start grinding counterexamples until I've found one, and then only report what went into finding that specific one

My latest for @quantamagazine.org is something a bit different from my usual fare: a first-person essay exploring what theoretical computer science has to do with computers.

Does Computer Science Need Computers? | Quanta Magazine

The theoretical side of the field doesn’t require computing machines. But many questions would never have been posed without them.

quantamagazine.org

Travel Awards for Students and Postdoctoral Fellows for #FOCS2026: details and application process are available at focs.computer.org/2026/travel-... Apply by ⏰ September 19!

I wrote up a new post about what AI software finding might mean for the backdoor debate. blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/08/14/e...

Everything is about to “go dark”

I’m coming down from spending a few days at Usenix Security, right here in my hometown of Baltimore. This means that my days have been taken up with two kinds of conversation: first, explaini…

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

If you haven’t seen it, this new paper is great. They expand on a blog post I wrote that showed you could replay encrypted reasoning blobs from AI models. And they turned it into a full jailbreak. stolen-thoughts.com

Anyway, your problem isn‘t finding the time to take notes. The problem is that taking notes is thinking and thinking has to be done by someone. women have been doing a lot of metacognition that looks like a task when it’s really thinking.

The IACR board has put forward a proposal to revamp the publishing of the general conference proceedings for Eurocrypt, Crypto, and Asiacrypt. iacr.org/hybridpropos... I would encourage members to engage in discussion about this on iacr.org/discuss

The documentation now includes a section on security fixes. mp-spdz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/se...