Suresh Govindarajan DLM

Theoretical Physicist, Perpetual Student, Recreational Runner, Moonshiner. There are 3464274974065172792 solid partitions of 72.

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@vrundasays_ Zagier is the best expositor for this.

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[Michael Haack @Michael_Haack_]

Want to learn more about generalized symmetries? Come to our school in Munich in the week October 5-9, 2026. More details can be found here: https://t.co/tdS2yk7UCp

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@vrundasays_ Your target audience should be someone else like you trying to learn something from your report.

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

It is hot here but it is beautiful as well.

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@hthieblot Mosaic and lynx -- both browsers.

[Karthik Nadar @runkarthikrun]

Happy Global Running Day!

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@hclaudio1918 @TheTennisLetter That is a playful banter between the two of them.

[Raghu Mahajan @raghumahajan]

I am excited to co-organize a two week school-plus-workshop on Worldsheet String Theory and String Field Theory at ICTS Bangalore from Nov 9 - Nov 20 later this year.

Interested PhD students, postdocs and faculty may please register at the link below:

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@bahudari Nothing that a bunch of CA's can't fix. ;-)

[IIT Madras Zanzibar Campus @IITMZanzibar]

Admit Cards for the IIT Madras Zanzibar BS Admission Screening Test 2026 are now out!

Candidates applying for the following programmes are requested to check their registered email IDs for the admit card details:

🔹 BS in Data Science & Artificial Intelligence
🔹 BS in Chemical Process Engineering

📅 Examination Date: 6 June 2026

Please ensure you carry your admit card and a valid photo ID to the test centre, and carefully review all reporting instructions.

Best wishes to all aspirants!

#IITMZanzibar #Admissions2026 #BSAdmissions #DataScience #ArtificialIntelligence #ChemicalEngineering #HigherEducation #StudyInZanzibar #FutureReady

[IIT Madras Zanzibar Campus @IITMZanzibar]

A New Chapter in Engineering Education for East Africa

Join us for the Curtain Raiser of the BS Programme in Chemical Process Engineering at IIT Madras Zanzibar and be part of a transformative initiative shaping the future of engineering education and industrial innovation in East Africa.

📅 9 June 2026
🕙 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
📍 IIT Madras Zanzibar, Bweleo Campus

🎓 Industry • Academia • Policymakers • Innovators

🔗 Register now:  https://t.co/nPuYYBKlQY
Registration is Free but Mandatory

#IITMadras #IITMZanzibar #ChemicalProcessEngineering #EngineeringEducation #IndustryAcademiaCollaboration #FutureReadyWorkforce #Sustainability #Innovation #HigherEducation #ChemicalEngineering #EastAfrica #BlueEconomy #Energy #Water #ProcessEngineering #STEMEducation

[Man Aman Singh Chhina @manaman_chhina]

One day you are playing with the careers of children in CBSE.
Next day you are Additional Secy Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.

Is this punishment?

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@keerthisiddeshw *Humbug, 2026!

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@LOLrakshak I have questions. What is Desi Bling? Who is Karan Kundra? 😃

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@udupendra In our family we had the tradition of using textbooks from one year senior. I was fourth on the list following two of my elder sisters and then another person. I never wrote anything on the textbooks and that carried over to all books. I used to pray for a textbook change. :-)

[Ritika Chopra @RitikaChopra__]

For the first time, more than 10,000 women have qualified for IIT admissions.

Nearly 1 in 4 female JEE-Advanced candidates cleared the exam in 2026 — the highest pass rate on record.

Since 2019, the number of women qualifying has jumped 89%. In 2018, only 13% of girls who appeared made it through. That figure is now nearly 25%.

@Pallavi_Smart reports
https://t.co/ElY8WcEV7v

[Rema Nagarajan @RemaNagarajan]

Please get in queue. One more card to be made. When will this madness end?👇🏽

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@DavidDack It is 30C at 6am and I'll be stepping out for a run. What is pace? Hydrate well is the only target. 😀

[Suresh Govindarajan DLM @modularform]

@runningmann100 This must correlate with increasing participation from India.