13 Facts About Scott Aaronson

Scott Joel Aaronson was born on May 21,1981 and is an American theoretical computer scientist and Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

Scott Aaronson enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers.

Scott Aaronson enrolled in The Clarkson School, a gifted education program run by Clarkson University, which enabled Aaronson to apply for colleges while only in his freshman year of high school.

Scott Aaronson was accepted into Cornell University, where he obtained his BSc in computer science in 2000, and where he resided at the Telluride House.

Scott Aaronson then attended the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD, which he got in 2004 under the supervision of Umesh Vazirani.

Scott Aaronson had shown ability in mathematics from an early age, teaching himself calculus at the age of 11, provoked by symbols in a babysitter's textbook.

Scott Aaronson discovered computer programming at age 11, and felt he lagged behind peers, who had already been coding for years.

In part due to Scott Aaronson getting into advanced mathematics before getting into computer programming, he felt drawn to theoretical computing, particularly computational complexity theory.

Scott Aaronson is a founder of the Complexity Zoo wiki, which catalogs all classes of computational complexity.

Scott Aaronson has taught a graduate-level survey course, "Quantum Computing Since Democritus", for which notes are available online, and have been published as a book by Cambridge University Press.

Since then, Scott Aaronson published a book entitled Quantum Computing Since Democritus based on the course.

An article of Scott Aaronson's, "The Limits of Quantum Computers", was published in Scientific American, and he was a guest speaker at the 2007 Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference.

Scott Aaronson is frequently cited in the non-academic press, such as Science News, The Age, ZDNet, Slashdot, New Scientist, The New York Times, and Forbes magazine.