An MIT OpenCourseWare course (6.080, Spring 2008) surveying major ideas in theoretical computer science, including computational complexity, cryptography, and related machine learning topics. Lecture notes and materials are available, and a YouTube lecture series by Ryan O'Donnell is also mentioned.

Commenters point to it as a rigorous, mathematically grounded overview of theoretical CS, with Scott Aaronson's lecture notes singled out as worth reading.

What commenters said (3)

1. Strongly recommendsjackfoxy2009in “Scott Aaronson: hopefully my last D-Wave post ever”

   I have been following Scott's site for several years. He is at the top of his field, one of the most qualified quantum computing theorists. Sometimes his sarcasm is juvenile and falls flat, but this post is classic. Yes you would have had to been following along to appreciate it. And it would help to know D-wave at one point actively recruited Scott.If you want to know whether or not quantum computation is taking place, this is your man.

   I highly recommend reading further on his site, including his papers and lecture notes. I especially recommend his lecture notes "Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science" http://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp08/6.080/materials.html and "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/

   Enjoy.

2. Recommendsaalhour2020in “Ask HN: Are there any online courses to learn Advanced Computer Science?”

   I loved Ryan O'Donnell's "Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science" series, you can find it on YouTube:

   https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm3J0oaFux3aafQm568bl...

   MIT OCW has a course on Advanced Data Structures which is just great! You can find the Fall-2017 version of it here:

   https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/fall17/

   I also started reading the "Streaming Systems" book which is a great reading on distributed data-intensive systems, I recommend it:

   https://www.amazon.de/dp/1491983876

   Also, you might be interested in checking out the Apache Beam, Flink, Spark and Storm projects, a lot of things happening on the front of designing data-intensive distributed systems, hacking a side project in any of these might be a fun learning activity.

   Best of luck!

3. Recommendspash2013in “A non-mathematical explanation of one way functions”

   If you want to take a closer (and, yes, mathematical) look at this idea, check out the lecture notes [0] from the MIT course Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science.

   Sections 4 and 5 of the introductory notes [1] give the classic example of using prime factorization to verify bets in a game of "flipping a coin over the telephone". Much of the rest of the course develops the major ideas underlying this example (computational complexity, cryptography) and shows you other things you can do with them (machine learning).

   0. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

   1. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... [PDF]

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