Letter from the Director, December 2025

Dear friends,

Season’s greetings from Berkeley, where we have donned our light jackets and the campus squirrels are newly plump for winter. We just concluded a fantastic semester with two highly energetic programs on Complexity and Linear Algebra (CLA) and on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies (AFECT). It was energizing to witness Calvin Lab bustling with collaborations filling up its open spaces. As always, you can find the workshop-talk videos on the workshop pages and on our YouTube channel. Two of the CLA workshops included explicit working group sessions before lunch each day, where small groups got together to collaborate and write down open problems to guide future research. This offered participants a unique glimpse into how researchers in different fields think, while also giving an opportunity for people who didn’t know each other to actively converse and create something together.

I’d like to congratulate some of our colleagues on recent achievements. Sushant Sachdeva, who was a research fellow in our very first semester of programs at the Simons Institute in 2013 and who has visited the Institute during multiple programs since, has received the 2025 Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science, “for his deep insights into mathematical optimization and the resolution of longstanding open questions in algorithmic theory.” And Simons Institute Research Director for Quantum Computing Umesh Vazirani, along with Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi, and Vijay Vazirani, was awarded a FOCS Test of Time Award for their 2005 paper, “AdWords and Generalized On-line Matching.” Please join me in congratulating them!

This fall, we held two events highlighting research collaboration between academia and industry: our 11th annual Industry Day and our fourth annual Quantum Industry Day. Quantum Industry Day coincidentally took place within days of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics to one of the day’s speakers, John Martinis. We’re delighted to share his talk with you in this issue of the newsletter.

Also in our SimonsTV corner this month are two recent Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures, one from each of our fall programs: Virginia Vassilevska Williams on Matrix Multiplication Algorithms and Martín Farach-Colton on Virtualization and the Cost of Indirection.

We’re grateful for your choice to be part of our global community — whether it’s as a program participant, workshop attendee, or YouTube subscriber. To the researchers among you: please also consider proposing a research program at the Institute. And feel free to reach out to me with your preliminary ideas as well. The Simons Institute is a community-driven research institution, and we do our best work through our collaborations with you.

And finally, we hope you’ll consider making a gift to the Simons Institute this holiday season. Our growing list of individual donors is a strong signal to institutional funders of our community’s investment in our work. Gifts of any size help, and will be matched one-to-one by Simons Foundation International. We are offering an attractive range of donor recognition gifts at various giving levels; you can reach out Senior Development Director Amy Ambrose for more information.

Happy holidays and a joyous close to 2025, one and all.

Warm regards,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing