One of the most well-established and disruptive uses for a future quantum computer is the ability to crack encryption. A new algorithm could significantly lower the barrier to achieving this. Despite ...

When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even ...

Quantum computers are coming. And when they arrive, they are going to upend the way we protect sensitive data. Unlike classical computers, quantum computers harness quantum mechanical effects — like ...

Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians ...

What is the most bizarre real number that you can imagine? Probably many people think of an irrational number such as pi (π) or Euler’s number. And indeed, such values can be considered “wild.” After ...

When I was 9, my family got a new computer. It was better than our old computer in every way save one: It couldn’t run my favorite racing game. What’s the point of a fancy new computer, I remember ...

“Q-Day” is the term some experts use to describe when large-scale quantum computers are able to factorize the large prime numbers that underlie our public encryption systems, such as the ones that are ...

Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it. On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two ...