Part 4/8:
One of the most tangible applications of quantum computing is in the realm of prime number factorization. Primes play a crucial role in cryptography—most notably in RSA encryption, which relies on the difficulty of reversing the multiplication of two large prime numbers into their constituent factors.
In 1995, mathematician Peter Shor developed an algorithm that, if implemented on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, could render traditional encryption methods obsolete by efficiently factoring large numbers. While IBM successfully demonstrated Shor's algorithm on a seven-qubit quantum computer in 2001, challenges persist in scaling quantum technology to practical use.