Elliptic Curves Yield Their Secrets in a New Number System

Many complicated advances in research mathematics are spurred by a desire to understand some of the simplest questions about numbers. How are prime numbers distributed in the integers? Are there perfect cubes (like 8 = 23 or 27 = 33) that can be written as the sum of two other cubes? More generally, mathematicians might want to solve an equation. But it is often impossible to do so by tinkering…

Source