About Me

    Michael
  • I am a sixth and final year PhD student at the University of Washington, advised by Paul Beame, and prior to that, I completed my MS at UC Berkeley working with Avishay Tal. I am currently on the job market for positions that value both teaching and research. I am passionate about teaching, and I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science, but have a particular affinity for proof/monotone circuit complexity, quantum computing, and Boolean function analysis.
  • Recently, I have become an avid climber, but I also enjoy racket sports, having been president of Cal's table tennis club (CalTTC) and done a bit of competing myself in the past.

  • Email: mdwhit (at) cs (dot) washington (dot) edu

Research

For everything, see my Google Scholar. Here are the more recent ones!

  • Communication Complexity of Collision Finding and Cutting Planes Proof Complexity of (Concise) Pigeonhole Principle (Appeared in ICALP 2025) (manuscript: link)
    • joint work with Paul Beame.
    • We proved a fun collection of results about how much communication is required to find a collision on an input where there is guaranteed to be one!
  • Quantum Time-Space Tradeoffs for Matrix Problems (appeared in STOC 2025) (SIAM version: pdf)
  • On the Rational Degree of Boolean Functions and Applications (To appear in CJTCS) (link)
  • Searching for Regularity in Bounded Functions (appeared in ICALP 2023) (link)
    • joint work with Siddharth Iyer
    • We spent some time trying to find subspaces for which bounded functions become pseudorandom.
  • Junta Distance Approximation with Sub-Exponential Queries (appeared in CCC 2021) (link)
    • joint work with Vishnu Iyer and Avishay Tal
    • Ever wondered how many (input, output) pairs from your function f you have to look at to estimate how close f is to only depending on a few of its inputs? So did we. This work gives an improved algorithm for answering this question for Boolean functions. If you are really interested in questions like this, you can check out my master's thesis, which starts with a survey of the previous work done on junta testing and (almost) all its variants.
    • Here's a talk I gave: link and here is slightly more detailed talk that Avishay gave: link

Teaching

  • UC Berkeley:
    • EECS 126: Probability and Stochastic Processes. (Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Head TA: Fall 2020, Spring 2021)
  • University of Washington:
    • CSE 431: Intro to Theory of Computation. (Spring 2022, Spring 2024, Winter 2025)
    • CSE 493Q: Intro to Quantum Computation. (Spring 2023)
    • CSE 312: Intro Probability. (Summer 2024, Autumn 2024, Autumn 2025)
    • CSE 332: Data Structures and Parallelism (Winter 2026, Instructor Summer 2026)
    • CSE 421: Algorithms (Autumn 2026)
I have an old blog, which you can find here.

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