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 ...

(Phys.org) -- While factoring an integer is a simple problem when the integer is small, the complexity of factorization greatly increases as the integer increases. When the integer grows to more than ...

Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well ...

(Phys.org)—Generating a sequence of random numbers may be more difficult than it sounds. Although the numbers may appear random, how do you know for sure that they don't actually follow some complex, ...

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 ...

Generating a string of random numbers is easy. The hard part is proving that they’re random. As Dilbert creator Scott Adams once pointed out, “that’s the problem with randomness: you can never be sure ...