Aaronson grew up in the United States, though he spent a year in Asia when his father—a science writer turned public-relations executive—was posted to Hong Kong.

[3] He enrolled in a school there that permitted him to skip ahead several years in math, but upon returning to the US, he found his education restrictive, getting bad grades and having run-ins with teachers.

[12] In the interview to Scientific American he answers why his blog is called shtetl-optimized, and about his preoccupation to the past: Shtetls were Jewish villages in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe.

He has also taught a graduate-level survey course, "Quantum Computing Since Democritus",[15] for which notes are available online, and have been published as a book by Cambridge University Press.

An article of Aaronson's, "The Limits of Quantum Computers", was published in Scientific American,[18] and he was a guest speaker at the 2007 Foundational Questions in Science Institute conference.

[19] Aaronson is frequently cited in the non-academic press, such as Science News,[20] The Age,[21] ZDNet,[22] Slashdot,[23] New Scientist,[24] The New York Times,[25] and Forbes magazine.