In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated ...

If you’ve ever picked up a war novel, you know they tend to deal with the exploits of soldiers and sailors, the dirt and danger of the front lines. Not Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” This ...

It all begins with mathematics really - the one true scientific language, so they say. Cryptography has been around as early as 4000 years ago, doing what it still does today - ensuring that secrets ...

"Large bureaucracies, with the power that the computer gives them, become more powerful," said New York Times reporter David Burnham in a 1983 C-Span interview about his book The Rise of the Computer ...

Recently, Professor Zong Chuanming from the Center for Applied Mathematics at Tianjin University published a paper titled ...

One influential image that is popular among scientists is the view that mathematics is the language of nature. The present article discusses another possible way to approach the relation between ...

Recently, I co-authored and published a math paper that solved a 15-year-old mystery. But, unlike a book or a gadget, the work cannot be copyrighted or bought and sold. In fact, my co-author and I ...

Quantum encryption, born from the quantum computing revolution, heralds a new era of unprecedented security. This ...

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 ...