I opened TQC 2026 with an invited talk. In order to make the content more accessible, I decided to publish it as a series of blog posts here as well.
I wrote this series of blog posts by hand, not by having AI summarize my talk. I promise it will be more fun to read than an AI summary of my talk would be.
The talk
Recently, there has been a pretty dramatic shift in the expected timelines by which we need to shift to post-quantum cryptography. I gave my talk about how this happened—both the technical developments that led to it, and why they were not foreseen.
I themed the talk around “A Series of Unfortunate Assumptions,” playing off the title of the book series (and later movies etc.) “A Series of Unfortunate Events” that I enjoyed as a kid. I think as a field we were pretty reasonable in making most of the assumptions I explore here, it’s just surprising and unfortunate that our expectations didn’t always hold up. Indeed, while scientists are all about rigor (allegedly), it’s unavoidable that we must guide our explorations using heuristics and assumptions. Also note that I’m not claiming that everyone made all of these assumptions—if you read this post and think to yourself, “Hey, I didn’t assume that!”, good for you! But I’ll at least take personal responsibility and say that I have certainly assumed each one at various points in my research.
Without further ado, in this series of posts we will explore the following assumptions: