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 ...

In 1994, Peter Shor, an American mathematician working at Bell Labs, published a paper with a wonky title and earth-shaking implications. In “Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and ...

Peter Shor published one of the earliest algorithms for quantum computers in 1994. Running Shor's algorithm on a hypothetical quantum computer, one could rapidly factor enormous numbers—a seemingly ...

Quantum computers still can’t do much. Almost every time researchers have found something the high-tech machines should one day excel at, a classical algorithm comes along that can do it just as well ...