What’s the best way to solve hard problems? That’s the question at the heart of a subfield of computer science called computational complexity theory. It’s a hard question to answer, but flip it ...

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 ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Say you want to send a private message, cast a secret vote, or sign a document securely. If you do any of these tasks on a computer, you ...

Encryption—the process of sending a scrambled message that only the intended recipient’s device can decode—allows private and public sectors alike to safeguard information. Traditional encryption uses ...