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 ...