Scott Aaronson

Aaronson taught himself calculus at 11. The following year his father, a science writer turned public-relations executive, was transferred by AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry from Philadelphia to Hong Kong, where he attended an English-language school that let him skip a grade and move years ahead in math.⁠[1]

Back in the United States, he joined a yearlong program for gifted students at Clarkson University and entered Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry in what would have been his junior year of high school.⁠[1]

In August 2002 he opened the Complexity Zoo, an online catalog that initially listed 196 complexity classes; in October 2005 he handed it over as a wiki anyone could edit, by which time it had grown to 443.⁠[2]

He received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, in 2004 under Umesh Vazirani, then held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo (2004–2007).⁠[3]

In fall 2007 he joined MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in spring 2013.⁠[3]

On November 5, 2010, President Barack Obama named the recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers; he, then the TIBCO Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, was one of seven MIT recipients.⁠[4]

On November 14, 2010, he and Alex Arkhipov posted “The Computational Complexity of Linear Optics” on arXiv, defining a model in which identical photons pass through a linear-optical network and arguing that it can solve sampling problems intractable for classical computers.⁠[5]

On March 8, 2012, the National Science Foundation named him and Robert Wood of Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry as recipients of the Alan T. Waterman Award, which honors outstanding researchers under 35; each received a $1 million grant over five years.⁠[6]

His book Quantum Computing since Democritus was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.⁠[7]

In February 2016 he announced that he would leave MIT for the University of Texas at Austin, adding that his wife, Dana Moshkovitz Aaronson, would join its computer science department as a tenured associate professor.⁠[8]

UT Austin announced on March 4, 2016, that he would join that fall as the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science and become founding director of a new quantum computing center.⁠[9]

In August 2017 he was named a Simons Foundation Investigator, receiving research support of $100,000 a year for five years.⁠[10]

In October 2019 he reviewed GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s quantum supremacy paper before publication and said the result was “still a major breakthrough,” while saying IBM’s objections might be partly right.⁠[11]

On October 30 he published an op-ed in The New York Times on the significance of the quantum supremacy experiment.⁠[12]

On February 17, 2020, he appeared on episode 72 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing philosophy in science, how quantum computers work, decoherence, quantum supremacy, and breaking cryptography with quantum computers.⁠[13]

On October 12, 2020, he returned for episode 130, discussing the simulation hypothesis, consciousness, Roger Penrose’s views on consciousness, the Turing test, GPT-3, and P versus NP.⁠[14]

On April 14, 2021, he was announced as recipient of the 2020 ACM Prize in Computing “for groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing”; the $250,000 prize is funded by an InfosysInfosysInfosys (Infosys Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India, founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others. Listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of $20.158 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 328,000 employees, and is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry endowment, and the announcement noted that he helped develop the concept of quantum supremacy.⁠[15]

On June 17, 2022, he announced he would take a year’s leave from UT Austin to work at OpenAI with a team including Jan Leike, John Schulman, and Ilya SutskeverIlya SutskeverIlya Sutskever is a computer scientist who studied under Geoffrey Hinton, helped develop AlexNet and sequence-to-sequence learning, and is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. As a board member in 2023 he took part in removing Sam Altman, and after leaving OpenAI in 2024 he founded Safe Superintelligence, which he has led as CEO since 2025.Open the full entry on the theoretical foundations of AI safety and alignment.⁠[16]

He ultimately spent the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 academic years at OpenAI.⁠[17]

In December 2022, in a lecture at UT Austin, he revealed that OpenAI was developing a tool to statistically watermark AI-generated text and that OpenAI engineer Hendrik Kirchner had built a prototype; he said the aim was to make it harder to pass off AI output as human-written, guarding against misuse such as academic plagiarism and mass propaganda.⁠[18]

In April 2026 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of 120 members chosen at its 163rd annual meeting; he said he was grateful to the colleagues, mentors, and students who had believed in and helped him.⁠[19]

ACM SIGACT gave him the inaugural Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science for his sustained efforts to explain and promote the field to broad audiences, noting that his blog Shtetl-Optimized had carried frequent, detailed posts for more than two decades; the award was presented at STOC, held June 22–26, 2026, in Salt Lake City.⁠[20]

As of October 2026 he was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at UT Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center, researching the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory, and teaching a graduate course on AI alignment theory in fall 2026.⁠[17]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.scottaaronson.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]

Shtetl-Optimized: Blog: https://scottaaronson.blog/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

UT Austin: Official website: https://www.utexas.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]