9/11 in Berkeley

Note: Of course I’ve been glued all week to the dramatic developments in AI. I’m working on a post about them. I’m not good at reacting to things in a timely way. So today, I’ll do my post marking the tragedy a quarter-century ago that we all commemorate. Please feel free to share your 9/11 memories in the comments. Also, Shana Tova to those who celebrate! The morning of September 11, 2001, I was a second-year PhD student at Berkeley, who woke up late in his dorm room at International House, after a long night spent closing in on the proof of the quantum lower bound for finding collisions. Rolling over to my laptop, I saw a flurry of weird emails, including one from Prof. Christos Papadimitriou saying that “we’re a community, and we’ll all support each other,” and another from Prof. Luca Trevisan (whose algorithms course I was then TA’ing) saying “on a day like this, it’s impossible to think about algorithms. Class is cancelled.” Confused, I clicked over to the New York Times and saw…