Scott Aaronson is a professor of computer science at University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. Previously he received his PhD at UC Berkeley and was a faculty member at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2007-2016. Scott has won numerous prizes for his research on quantum computing and complexity theory, including the Alan T Waterman award in 2012 and the ACM Prize in Computing in 2020. In addition to being a world class scientist, Scott is famous for his highly informative and entertaining blog Schtetl Optimized, which has kept the scientific community up to date on quantum hype for nearly the past two decades.

In this episode, Scott Aaronson gives a crash course on quantum computing, diving deep into the details, offering insights, and clarifying misconceptions surrounding quantum hype.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen

Correction: 59:03: The matrix denoted as "Hadamard gate" is actually a 45 degree rotation matrix. The Hadamard gate differs from this matrix by a sign flip in the last column. See 1:11:00 for the Hadamard gate.

Part I. Introduction (Personal)

• 00:00: Biography

Part II. Introduction (Technical)

• 22:57: Overview

Part III. Setup

• 36:10: Review of classical bits

Part IV. Working with qubits

• 57:02: Unitary operators, quantum gates

Part V. Quantum Speedup

• 1:35:48: Query complexity (black box / oracle model)

Part VI. Complexity Classes

• 2:08:41: Recap. History of Simon's and Shor's Algorithm

Part VII. Quantum Supremacy

• 2:43:46: Scalable quantum computing

Homepage: www.timothynguyen.org