Sidebar: I absolutely adore Scott "I don't give a fuck anymore" Aaronson.<p>My personal aspirations to this kind of biting wit are futile and vain, but my admiration for it is even greater and some people can bring it off with style to spare, and ever since that uh, thing, Scott is just playing the ten minute guitar solo.<p>Into to Number Theory with periodicity and modular math might be stretching "nothing more than arithmetic" a bit, but fuck it, this is the best accessible discussion of Shor I've ever read and if there's any justice in the multiverse it will become the go-to link on the topic, which will mean that 10^500 laypeople will roll their eyes at the next 10^500 "quantum computers are the next step after digital computers" Aeon fluff pieces floating by.