Their work revives long-standing mathematical curiosities but does so through a fresh window – additive combinatorics.

In fact, they have applications to something as ubiquitous and mundane as making a purchase online. Every time you enter your credit card number on the Internet, prime numbers spring into action.

Prime numbers are fundamental to the most common type of encryption used today: the RSA algorithm. The RSA algorithm was named after the three mathematicians who first publicly unveiled it in 1977.