Member-only story
Forbidden Numbers
Words are not just tools of communication, but vessels of power, capable of shaping thought and memory.
Authoritarian regimes seeking to silence dissent always want to control the language. Words can become dangerous.
But what happens when the same forces of control turn their attention to numbers? A fascinating article by Paolo Benanti on forbidden numbers reveals that digits, too, can become dangerous — not for their linguistic meaning, but for what they represent, encode, or disrupt.
From ancient mathematical heresies to modern digital rebellions, numbers have been banned, suppressed, and even criminalized, revealing a curious intersection of mathematics, law, and ideology.
Illegal prime numbers
In the late 1990s, the entertainment industry fought digital piracy by encrypting DVDs with the Content Scrambling System (CSS). Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen (“DVD Jon”) famously cracked this code with DeCSS, sparking legal battles over copyright and free speech. But the story took a mathematical turn when programmer Phil Carmody encoded DeCSS into “illegal prime numbers” — primes that, when translated into binary, recreated the forbidden software. These numbers exposed a paradox: while code can be…
