Siddharth Muthukrishnan

About

I'm a postdoctoral scholar at Pitt HPS and I'm also finishing up my PhD at the same department (both are supervised by David Wallace). I primarily work in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of computer science. I'm also interested in early modern philosophy (especially Newton and Descartes), biomedical ethics, and metaethics. Earlier, I did a PhD in quantum computing theory, and I continue to find that field fascinating.

Education and Experience

Postdoctoral Scholar, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (2024-)
PhD Candidate, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh (2019-2025)
PhD Student, Philosophy, University of Southern California (2018-2019) [Transferred to Pitt HPS along with David Wallace.]
PhD, Physics, University of Southern California (2018)
Research Assistant, Computer Science, Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India (2010-2011)
BTech, Engineering Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India (2010)

Publications

Forthcoming

"Many Worlds as Anti-Conspiracy Theory: Locally and causally explaining a quantum world without finetuning", in Alyssa Ney (Ed.). Everett and Locality (forthcoming volume with Oxford University Press). [pdf] [Preprint available at PhilSci Archive:24171]
"Unpacking Black Hole Complementarity" in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. [pdf] [Preprint available at PhilSci Archive:22594]
An accessible summary of this paper titled "Black Holes and Reality" is published in BJPS Short Reads [pdf]

Physics

Muthukrishnan, Albash, Lidar, “Sensitivity of quantum speedup by quantum annealing to a noisy oracle”, Physical Review A 2019
Muthukrishnan, Lidar, “Quasiadiabatic Grover search via the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approximation”, Physical Review A 2017
Muthukrishnan, Albash, and Lidar, “Tunneling and speedup in quantum optimization for permutation-symmetric problems”, Physical Review X 2016
Das, Sharma, and Muthukrishnan, “On Some Special Cases of the Entropy Photon-Number Inequality”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2012
Sharma, Das, and Muthukrishnan, “Entropy power inequality for a family of discrete random variables”, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory 2011

Works in progress

Drafts available on request. Preprints coming soon.

Vagueness and Fault-Tolerance [draft]
On the relation between Unruh and Hawking radiation (with Ignacio J. Araya)
Anti-Cartesianism in Newton's Third Rule
How far did Aristotle get with his theory of chance?