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 ...

A quantum computer is a machine designed to use quantum mechanics to do things which cannot be done by any machine based only on the laws of classical physics. Eventual applications of quantum ...

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

Mathematicians have reportedly discovered a new way of multiplying two numbers together. The new technique is for really large numbers, and if it passes a peer-review, could be the fastest possible ...

The AI-generated algorithms are already being used by millions of developers. DeepMind’s run of discoveries in fundamental computer science continues. Last year the company used a version of its ...