In October 2024 I attended a workshop at Harvard University where mathematicians talked through the uses of artificial intelligence in their field. Most were less worried about the future of math than ...

In recent years the Elliptic Curve Cryptography approach has become popular due to its high efficiency and strong security. The purpose of this article is to present this topic in a relatively clearer ...

Online data is generally pretty secure. Assuming everyone is careful with passwords and other protections, you can think of it as being locked in a vault so strong that even all the world's ...

The protection of confidential communications, a strategic pillar in the information age, has just received a revolutionary boost. A multidisciplinary team of French and Japanese scientists has ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

Cryptography often intimidates developers due to its mathematical complexity, yet it forms the backbone of modern computer security—from HTTPS connections to payment processing. While you don't need a ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Prime numbers are essential for technologies like RSA encryption, which rely on the difficulty of guessing these numerals. A new paper shows that another area of mathematics called integer partition ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

Prime numbers have captivated mathematicians for thousands of years—and now cloud computing is helping them chase the biggest ones yet. Reading time 5 minutes A shard of smooth bone etched with ...

A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

Hardly anyone is interested in my tax return—there’s not much to it. And that’s a good thing, given that an attacker might have fairly easily intercepted the encrypted communication between my laptop ...