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 all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

Don't know if you've heard, but there's a new largest known prime number in town. On 26 December, mathematicians scored a late Christmas present when a computer owned by a 51-year-old engineer in the ...

Mathematicians have reportedly discovered a new way of multiplying two numbers together. The new technique is for really large numbers, and if it passes a peer-review, could be the fastest possible ...

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of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has formally removed Dual_EC_DRBG from its draft guidance on random number generators.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

The phenomenal success of our integrated circuits managed to obscure an awkward fact: they’re not always the best way to solve problems. The features of modern computers—binary operations, separated ...

Data, numbers, algorithms are supposed to be neutral... right? Computer scientist Joy Buolamwini discusses the way biased algorithms can lead to real-world inequality. A version of this segment was ...