"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 ...

Neal Koblitz is a mathematician who, starting in the 1980s, became fascinated by mathematical questions in cryptography. In his article "The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography," ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...