Peter Shor

Contact information

Office Hours

Fall 2008: Tues. 2:40-4:00; Wed. 1:30-2:30

Courses:

In Fall 2008, I am teaching 18.435.

In Spring 2008, I am teaching 18.424: Seminar on Information Theory. Here is the website for the class.

I am also co-teaching 18.409/6.443/8.371 with Isaac Chuang.

In Spring 2007, I taught 18.424: Seminar on Information Theory.

In Fall 2006, I taught 18.435: Quantum computing and 18.091: Mathematical Exposition and

In Spring 2006, I co-taught 18.409/8.371J/6.443J. This was an advanced course on quantum computation
Here is the web page for this course.

In Fall 2005, I taught 18.310, Principles of Applied Mathematics
Here is the web page for this course.

Publications:

My publications list.
A list of some of my papers. These were available electonically at my ATT website, and I've put some of them up on this website. If there's one that you want that I don't have up, please email me.

Interests:

My interests are currently algorithms, quantum computing, computational geometry and combinatorics.

New Directions Course Notes

Past Courses:

In Fall 2004, I co-taught 18.435 with Seth Lloyd and taught 18.447.
18.447 is the web page for 18.447. We will be using the textbook Alon and Spencer, The Probabilistic Method. I will be trying to use examples both from combinatorics and algorithms, but the emphasis will likely be on combinatorics, since this is the emphasis in the textbook. I haven't taught this course before, so I don't know exactly how much material I will end up covering, but my current plan is to cover at least the basic probabilistic method (selections from chapters 1-3), the second moment method (chapter 4), the Lovasz local lemma (chapter 5), martingales (chapter 7), and random graphs (chapter 10). I would also like to cover chapters 6, 8 and 9 if we have time, as well as some more of the later ones. I plan to have homeworks roughly every other week, a midterm (either take-home or in-class, I haven't decided yet), and a term project.
For 18.435, there will be homeworks every other week, a midterm and a final. Seth and I have come up with a syllabus, and the pace will be somewhat slower than I went last year. The syllabus will be posted on the web fairly soon, and I will link to it from here when I get a chance. 18.435, Quantum Computing is the web page for my course for Fall, 2003.
18.419, Seminar in Theoretical Computer Science (really, topics in quantum computation) is the web page for my course Spring, 2004.

Other Stuff

You can see why I chose a career as a scientist rather than as a poet.

I gave a talk about Minkowski's and Keller's cube tiling conjectures conjectures, their motivations, and their eventual proof and disproof, in the IAP Mathematics Lecture Series, on January 26, 2004. The history of these conjectures is quite interesting, as Minkowski's original conjecture was motivated by a question about Diophantine approximations, but on the way to their resolutions, these conjectures mutated into questions about tiling high dimensional spaces with cubes, about finite Abelian groups, and about the structures of certain specific graphs. The lecture notes are here (with some typos fixed 02-08-02). The homework problems are here.

I often get asked what are some good reference material about quantum computation. There is a very nice set of tutorials at a quite elementary level at http://www.qubit.org. A good textbook is Nielsen and Chuang. Good course notes at the web are available from John Preskill, Umesh Vazirani, and David Mermin. This last course (David Mermin's) is especially directed at computer scientists.

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