I am a PhD student in the Theory Group at Columbia advised by Henry Yuen. I’m interested quantum computing, especially complexity, cryptography and learning theory. Some specific problems that I think about are QMA versus QMA1, Shadow Tomography, the Complexity of Unitary Synthesis problems, among other problems in Quantum Complexity and Cryptography.

Email: johnb at cs dot columbia dot edu

Publications

1. John Bostanci and John Watrous. Quantum game theory and the complexity of approximating quantum Nash equilibria. Quantum, 2022.
2. John Bostanci and Alex Kubica. Finding the disjointness of stabilizer codes is NP-complete. Physical Review Research, 2022.
3. Adam Bene Watts and John Bostanci. Quantum Event Learning and Gentle Random Measurements. Preprint, 2022.
4. John Bostanci, Yuval Efron, Tony Metger, Alexander Poremba, Luowen Qian, Henry Yuen. Unitary Complexity and the Uhlmann Transformation Problem. Preprint, 2022.

Teaching

In Fall 2022 I was a TA for Introduction to Quantum Computing at Columbia, taught by Henry Yuen.

In Summer 2023 I was a TA for Topological Aspects of Error Correcting Codes at the Park City Mathematics Institute Graduate Summer School, taught by Jeongwan Haah.

Work Experience

I used to work for a start-up derivatives exchange called Kalshi, where I helped design and build the exchange, as well as designed and built most of the connections with external parties including Bloomberg, brokers, and market makers.

I also used to work for Citadel on the Alpha Research and Development team. Some of my projects include X-Alpha (a graph based resource manager for creating terms), and Leonov (a neural architecture that performed better than human modelers on near term alpha).