I am an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research area is theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on lattices and geometric algorithms.

Previously, I was an assistant professor at Oregon State University, did postdocs at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, and completed my Ph.D. at New York University. My CV is available here. My email address is huck.bennett@colorado.edu.

Research

Publications:

  1. The more the merrier! On the complexity of finding multicollisions, with connections to codes and lattices (ECCC)
    Huck Bennett, Surendra Ghentiyala, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    Preprint.
  2. Matrix Multiplication Verification Using Coding Theory (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Karthik Gajulapalli, Alexander Golovnev, and Philip G. Warton
    Preprint.
  3. Topological k-metrics (arXiv)
    Willow Barkan-Vered, Huck Bennett, and Amir Nayyeri
    SOCG 2024.
  4. Parameterized Inapproximability of the Minimum Distance Problem over all Fields and the Shortest Vector Problem in all l_p Norms (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Mahdi Cheraghchi, Venkatesan Guruswami, and João Ribeiro
    STOC 2023.
  5. Lattice Problems Beyond Polynomial Time (arXiv)
    Divesh Aggarwal, Huck Bennett, Zvika Brakerski, Alexander Golovnev, Rajendra Kumar, Zeyong Li, Spencer Peters, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan
    STOC 2023.
  6. The Complexity of the Shortest Vector Problem (ECCC)
    Huck Bennett
    ACM SIGACT News 54 (1), pp. 37-61, 2023.
  7. Just how hard are rotations of Z^n? Algorithms and cryptography with the simplest lattice (ePrint)
    Huck Bennett, Atul Ganju, Pura Peetathawatchai, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    EUROCRYPT 2023.
  8. Hardness of the (Approximate) Shortest Vector Problem: A Simple Proof via Reed-Solomon Codes (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett and Chris Peikert
    RANDOM 2023.
  9. Improved Hardness of BDD and SVP Under Gap-(S)ETH (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Chris Peikert, and Yi Tang
    ITCS 2022.
  10. Reconstructing Weighted Voting Schemes from Partial Information about their Power Indices (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Anindya De, Rocco Servedio, and Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis
    COLT 2021.
  11. Fine-grained hardness of CVP(P)--- Everything that we can prove (and nothing else) (arXiv, blog post)
    Divesh Aggarwal, Huck Bennett, Alexander Golovnev, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    SODA 2021.
  12. Hardness of Bounded Distance Decoding on Lattices in l_p Norms (arXiv, CCC talk)
    Huck Bennett and Chris Peikert
    CCC 2020.
  13. An Enumeration Technique for Lattice Basis Reduction (local copy)
    Huck Bennett
    Preprint.
  14. On the Quantitative Hardness of CVP (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Alexander Golovnev, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    FOCS 2017.
  15. On the Lattice Distortion Problem (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Daniel Dadush, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    ESA 2016.
  16. Planar Minimization Diagrams via Subdivision with Applications to Anisotropic Voronoi Diagrams
    Huck Bennett, Evanthia Papadopoulou, and Chee Yap
    SGP 2016.
  17. On Percolation and NP-hardness (ECCC)
    Huck Bennett, Daniel Reichman, and Igor Shinkar
    Random Structures & Algorithms 54 (2), pp. 228-257, 2019. Preliminary version in ICALP 2016.
  18. Amortized Analysis of Smooth Quadtrees in All Dimensions (link)
    Huck Bennett and Chee Yap
    Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 63, pp. 20-39, 2017. Preliminary version in SWAT 2014.

Teaching and Mentorship

As Lead instructor:

  • Honors Analysis of Algorithms, Oregon State University, Winter 2023.
  • Analysis of Algorithms, Oregon State University, Fall 2021, Winter 2023, Fall 2023.
  • Foundations of Computer Science, University of Michigan, Fall 2019 (joint with Chris Peikert and Ilya Volkovich).
  • Lattices in Computer Science, Northwestern University, Spring 2019 and Oregon State University, Spring 2022.
  • Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, Northwestern University, Winter 2018, Spring 2018, Fall 2018.
  • Computational Geometry, Northwestern University, Fall 2017, Winter 2019.
Notes on background material for discrete math are available here.

Students:

  • Philip Warton (Ph.D.; co-advised with Amir Nayyeri; 2022 - Present)
  • Kaung Myat Htay Win (M.S.; 2023 - Present)
  • Willow Barkan-Vered (M.S.; co-advised with Amir Nayyeri; 2022 - 2023)
  • Ian Tassin (Undergraduate; 2021 - 2023)
  • Ryan Little (Undergraduate; 2021 - 2022)
  • Andrew Hwi Gue Cho (Undergraduate; 2018)

About

In my spare time I enjoy running, mountaineering, and skiing. Additionally, I enjoy reading and playing Go.

I am originally from the bustling metropolis of Hygiene, CO, which was named for the sanitarium that it once housed, and which is now most famous as the home of Apple the Cow.

My full first name, Huxley, is actually an English last name.