The Future of Cryptography is Cranks

First published: March 2005

Karl Mahlburg, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, has used a "combinatorial" approach to proved "the crank" can be generalised to all primes. The crank is a rule deduced in the 1980's that explained congruences, a number pattern discovered by genius Srinivasa Ramanujan in the early Twentieth Century.

The New Scientist comments, "The solution may one day lead to advances in particle physics and computer security."