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 ...

NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has formally removed Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance on random number generators. This is ...

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 ...

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 ...

ALGORITHMS sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. Browse for a book on Amazon.com ...