“So, he’s the Beyoncé of this event?” a young woman standing behind me says to a colleague. The three of us are standing, looking at the back of a crowd, whose members are all looking at a bearded man ...

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 ...