the beauty of prime numbers in cryptography

This animation was made in collaboration with Michael Dunworth. We had been exploring prime number visualizations in the context of cryptography, and decided to turn it into a video.


This video is not intended to be used as a complete technical tutorial on primes in cryptosystems. Rather, it is an impressionistic and highly-visual exploration of some basic mathematical principles behind crypto, such as prime factorization, modular arithmetic, and exponentiation.


The original inspiration is based on http://divisorplot.com/ which has an interface for interactive exploration of composite number patterns.


As of April 2022, work is still ongoing, and we hope to come up with some cool new animations with prime number patterns. We may not make any important discoveries or useful designs, but we are dedicated to making these concepts visually stimulating, and we hope it will be interesting to non-technical people. The subject of digital security is becoming increasingly important in daily life. We figure having a little fun with it and offering up some visual playthings can't hurt.

See more visual math at http://mathviz.com/