Spreading the Gospel of Theoretical Computer Science to an Omega(1) Fraction of Humanity: My Trevisan Award Acceptance Speech at STOC

Take that, Shtetl-Optimized haters of the world! With longtime friend and colleague Salil Vadhan, as well as Luca Trevisan’s widower Junce Zhang, at the STOC banquet on Tuesday, before I was given half an hour to try to make people laugh Spreading the Gospel of Theoretical Computer Science to an Ω(1) Fraction of Humanity (Or, How We Can Do Like the Physicists)Scott Aaronson’s Trevisan Award Acceptance SpeechSalt Lake City, Utah, June 23, 2026 Thank you so much! It’s one of the highlights of my life, frankly, to accept the first-ever Luca Trevisan Award for Expository Work in Theoretical Computer Science—because of, firstly, what this entire STOC community means to me, but also what Luca Trevisan in particular meant to me. Luca was one of the main people who taught me complexity theory—first at an IAS summer school in 2000, then at UC Berkeley, where I took two of his courses and TA’ed for him. As a member of my dissertation committee, Luca once stood on a street corner in San…