This paper considers the problem of solving systems of quadratic equations, namely, recovering an object of interest \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} from \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} quadratic equations/samples \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} , \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} . This problem, also dubbed as phase retrieval, spans multiple domains including physical sciences and machine learning.