In the early 1990s, even the scientists who were in the initial stages of applying quantum mechanics to computing doubted that anyone could ever do useful calculations with their techniques. Those ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Peter Shor is a poet. Here is a limerick he ...

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 ...

Long before scientists were talking much about it, Robert Redford fans learned about the power of quantum computers. It was 1992. A goofy movie called Sneakers warned about the dangers of computers ...