Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 ...

Prime numbers are more than just numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. They are a mathematical mystery, the secrets of which mathematicians have been trying to uncover ever since ...