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 ...

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 ...

Just in time for Friday's $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot, I was contacted by something called Lotto N Crowd that says its proprietary algorithm can help customers pick winning numbers. Gracious ...

You're probably familiar with Fibonacci series of numbers, first analyzed in a published manuscript by the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo, son of Fibonacci of Pisa (in what is now Italy). The ...

One of the curious properties of mathematics is its beauty. But exactly what mathematicians mean by beauty is hard to capture. Perhaps the most famous example is Euler’s relation, e iπ + 1 = 0, which ...

MIT’s Peter Shor explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption Internet security relies on the fact that our computers can’t break its ...

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 ...