What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer -- 3 and 5 -- by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even ...

Researchers introduced new concepts and arithmetic functions that could play a significant role in the quantum factorization problem. The Factorization Ensemble is the main one; it allows us to bind ...

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 ...

Factorising is the inverse of expanding brackets. The function machines below demonstrate this. Factorise 6t + 10. To factorise, look for a number which is a factor of both 6 and 10 (that is why it is ...

The Mathematical Gazette is the original journal of the Mathematical Association and it is now over a century old. Its readership is a mixture of school teachers, college and university lecturers, ...

Researchers report that they have designed and built a quantum computer from five atoms in an ion trap. The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor's algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor ...