“Theoretical ideas have a real-life impact,” said Michael Oser Rabin in a 2009 interview, 14 and he spent nearly seven decades proving it. He died on April 14, 2026, in Jerusalem, Israel, at the age ...

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze several variants of a simple method for generating prime numbers with fewer random bits. To generate a prime p less than x, the basic idea is to fix a constant q ∝ ...

A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography. Everyone knows that a prime number is one that cannot be ...

Back in the mid-1970s, Avi Wigderson had completed his service in the Israeli army and was preparing to head to Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, where he thought he would study mathematics.

Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number ...

While hardware errors have garnered significant attention as the major obstacle to quantum computing, the error due to human factors in the implementation is less ...

Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first ...