Cryptography PhD student @ MIT, can also be found playing the mridangam
Joined July 2018
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Seyoon Ragavan retweeted
Actually 3 of 6 were already resolved.
mathematicians and muse spark collaborated to solve 6 open problems in math:
1. The Strict Threshold for Gaussian Ellipsoid Fitting
2. Finite-Time Blow-Up of Radial Negative-Energy Solutions for the Mass-Critical Biharmonic Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation
3. Semiabelian Groups Need Not Be Monomial
4. Tightness of the Cycle-Based Relaxation for Completed Length-Three Alpha-Cycles
5. String Two-Point Function = Height Function on a Curve
6. On Solvable Evolution Algebras and a Conjecture by García-Martínez and Pérez-Rodríguez
Exciting work settling the algorithmic PFR (polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa) problem by @aparna_gupte, Srinivasan Arunachalam, Arkopal Dutt, and Sabee Grewal! Congrats all!
Incredible result, congrats all!!!
Excited to share a joint work with Joshua Brakensiek, Yeyuan Chen, Louie Putterman, and Zihan Zhang (@VVfishtail) on list decoding Reed–Solomon codes up to capacity in the low, but still constant, rate regime!
eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2…
1/5
Our work (Prabhanjan Ananth, Amit Sahai, and myself) has now been covered in Scientific American by Peter Hall – thank you Peter for the great article!
scientificamerican.com/artic…
Now online at eprint.iacr.org/2026/1509!
The second GPT-powered result is a resolution of the unclonable encryption problem, concurrently and independently found by Prabhanjan Ananth and Amit Sahai as Henry mentions below. Their version is already available online and mine will be online within a couple of days. (1/3)
Our (LLMs') constructions are identical and the proofs are extremely close as well. The main difference is that the approaches bound the spectral norm of E_BE_C differently. (2/3)
I'm excited to share two GPT-fuelled results from this month! The first, with Aparna Gupte, shows under a plausible number-theoretic conjecture that there exists s-server private information retrieval for database size n with communication exp(\tilde{O}((log n)^{1/s})). (1/3)
The s = 2, 3 cases were resolved by Dvir-Gopi (2016) and Ghasemi-Kopparty-Sudan (2025), but as s grows, previous constructions needed 2^{O(s)} many servers (rather than our s) to get the same communication. (2/3)
Our construction builds on the "matching vectors + decoding polynomials" framework pioneered by Efremenko (2009) and recently refined by GKS25. In short: we find and plug in decoding polynomials exponentially sparser than previously known.
Link: eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2… (3/3)
Seyoon Ragavan retweeted
AI has now solved a major open problem -- one of the best known Erdos problems called the unit distance problem, one of Erdos's favourite questions and one that many mathematicians had tried.
openai.com/index/model-dispr…
Princeton folks: I'm excited to be speaking about this tomorrow at @the_IAS! Details here: ias.edu/math/events/computer….
Alexandra Henzinger, Ted Pyne and I recently resolved the below question (picture by Gemini), building on landmark results by James Cook, @ian_mertz and @rrwilliams. The starting point was a new connection to private information retrieval (PIR), a problem from cryptography. (1/5)
Alexandra Henzinger, Ted Pyne and I recently resolved the below question (picture by Gemini), building on landmark results by James Cook, @ian_mertz and @rrwilliams. The starting point was a new connection to private information retrieval (PIR), a problem from cryptography. (1/5)
Why MVCs and why the bizarre specifications for Computer C?
High-level answer: compared with RM codes, MVCs require fewer servers (enabling our memory reduction) but are otherwise less efficient (hence the need for the large catalytic hard drive). (4/5)
See eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2… for more! Hoping to see more ideas from cryptography shed light on catalytic computing. (5/5)
Seyoon Ragavan retweeted
Chevignard et al show residues also reduce the qubit cost of quantum attacks on elliptic curves: eprint.iacr.org/2026/280
The space savings is less dramatic than for factoring (1.6x instead of 6x), and they again pay a big gate count penalty (256x), but very interesting.
Can you encrypt a program to hide its inner workings while still enabling others to use it? This problem of "program obfuscation" is central to cryptography.
To learn more, see this article! It also touches on a paper by myself, @NeekonV, and @Vinod_MIT from TCC 2024.
In my latest blog I discuss the challenges of building a powerful cryptographic technique that aims to “obfuscate” the internal implementation details of programs-scieye.wordpress.com/2026/01…
Thanks @seyoonragavan & Rahul Ilango for the nice chat about their works @SimonsInstitute!
