Events on Friday, April 4th, 2025
- Climate & Diversity
- Diversity Forum Fridays! The Math Ain’t Mathing: Professionals of Color Working Twice as Hard to Get Half as Far
- Time: 9:00 am - 10:30 am
- Place: Chamberlin 5310 & Zoom
- Speaker: Rachel Zizmann
- Abstract: The purpose of this session is to explore the common refrain heard by professionals of color (working twice as hard to get half as far) and the impact that it has on job satisfaction, emotional and physical wellbeing, and burnout. This session will delve into the invisible labor and added pressure of being a person of color in the workspace, and how internal and external messages about competence, productivity, and expectations affect self-concept. This interactive session will help participants reflect on the messages they’ve received throughout their journey to becoming professionals and aid them in identifying strategies to unlearn unhelpful thought patterns and behaviors. This presentation will incorporate concepts from Hershey’s Rest is Resistance model, Black feminist theory, and cognitive behavioral theory.
- Physics Department Colloquium
- The Future of Quantum Supremacy Experiments
- Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
- Place: 2241 CH
- Speaker: Scott Aaronson, University of Texas Austin
- Abstract: I'll advocate a research agenda for designing quantum computations that are
(1) feasible on near-term, non-error-corrected, "NISQ" devices,
(2) hard to simulate classically, and
(3) easy to verify classically,
where right now we only have any two of the three. The agenda involves understanding the structure of otherwise-random quantum circuits that have been postselected to have the behavior that we want (such as producing verifiable outputs), and includes concrete open problems on which progress seems feasible. I'll also discuss potential applications to generating cryptographically certified random bits -- a proposal of mine from 2018 that was just experimentally demonstrated this year, albeit without efficient classical verification. - Host: Deniz Yavuz