RSA (2023, Age 17)

Prime numbers are magical. Among their applications is the well-known RSA cryptosystem — relying on how difficult it is to factor numbers. I have always seen encryption as some hand-wavy abstract math, but I figured now would as good of a time as ever to give it a try. I loaded up the Wikipedia page for RSA and programmed it in Python — and it was slow. Really slow. As it turns out, taking something to the 65,537th power is quite computationally expensive. So, I learned how to multithread it! I split encryption and decryption into tiny tasks that can be doled out to individual CPU threads, which greatly increases the pace of encryption and decryption. Check out the source code here!