Jay Wacker
I live in the Bay Area with my wife Mira and daughter Zoe. I've spent my career moving between deep technical problems and the real world. As a theoretical physicist at SLAC and Stanford, I proposed new paradigms for dark matter, helped redesign how the LHC searches for new particles, and published 64 papers with ~10,000 citations. At Quora, I built the systems that organized the world's knowledge on a top-30 website. At Apple, I lead the ML team behind Siri's natural language understanding, shipping across 6 operating systems to billions of users.
I write about things I'm curious about: wealth tax design from first principles, what Bronze Age DNA reveals about Greek mythology, and how to develop engineers who think for themselves. Outside of work, I cook, take photographs, travel actively (40+ countries and counting), and read too many books about ancient civilizations.
Latest writing
- Dialing the Quantum-Classical Border — 4/4/2026
- Developing Engineers Who Direct Themselves — 4/3/2026
- Oedipus Before Homer — 4/3/2026
- Eliminating an Escape Velocity: Ending Unending Accumulation — 3/28/2026
Selected research
- Deconstructing Six-Dimensional Gauge Theories with Strongly Coupled Moose Meshes — unpublished
- Phenomenology of Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from Theory Space — JHEP 0208:020 (2002)
- The Minimal Moose for a Little Higgs — JHEP 0208:021 (2002)
- Structures of Medium-Sized Silicon Clusters — Nature 392 (1998) 582-585