The Big Book of Prime Secrets: How Numbers Keep Secrets, and Why No One Has Cracked Them is the biggest book I’ve put out, and it pulls together everything I’ve been chasing for years.
One story, not a box set
It isn’t an omnibus. It takes the material from The Wall at Two, Preservation and Horizons, The Real Gatekeeper and Light Through the Holes, along with the computer science around them, and rewrites all of it into a single line of argument. If you’ve read the shorter books, this is where they meet.
What it covers
The question at its center is simple to ask and hard to answer: multiplying two primes takes a moment, so why is splitting the result back apart so hard that the world’s secrets rest on it? The book works through the classical methods people have tried, the history behind them, and what each attempt teaches about where the difficulty actually lives. Quantum computing is deliberately left out. This is about the classical problem on its own terms.
It also brings in invariants and systems theory, because that’s where my own way of thinking about difficulty came from. And it includes an honest account of my Lumens Per Watt experiment, the failures included.
Who it’s for
If I had to name one reader, it’s the computer hobbyist who has always wondered, from the math side, why cryptography works at all. You don’t need a degree, just curiosity and some patience.
Read or watch
The cover is my painting Inexhaustive. The book is on Amazon, and the whole thing is free as a two-part scrolling-text read-along on YouTube.
Read: The Big Book of Prime Secrets on Amazon
Watch free: Part One · Part Two
