Nib explains
Big stories, from the basics up
Some news stories are too good for a paragraph. An explainer takes one of them and starts at the very beginning, so that by the end you understand not just what happened, but how it works. There are toys to play with along the way.
Nib says: I keep these in my casebook. Each case is a set of short chapters. Read them in order, poke every button, and skip nothing; the early ones are what make the ending land.
The casebook
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Cryptography · 10 chapters
The Case of the Mystery Seeds
For 25 years nobody knew where the numbers behind the internet's most-used encryption curves came from. In October 2026, Claude worked it out in under half an hour. Learn the math from scratch, then follow the trail yourself.
Open the case file -
Number theory · one page
Fermat's Ladder
Square, add one, repeat. The first five rungs are prime, then the primes stop. Hunt factors of billion-digit numbers in your browser, and see why nobody knows whether F33 is prime.
Climb the ladder -
Computer arithmetic · one page
Bigints for Float People
Floating point rounds; big integers never do. See where doubles stop counting, how Karatsuba multiplies faster, and run an exact proof that a 62-bit prime divides a number with 10 quadrillion digits.
Do the exact math - Coming later
The next case
Nib is still digging.