The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In our increasingly digital lives, security depends on cryptography. Send a private message or pay a bill online, and you’re relying on ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...

Late last year, the Justice Department joined the growing list of agencies to discover that algorithms don’t heed good intentions. An algorithm known as PATTERN placed tens of thousands of federal ...