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I'm interested in the factors (no pun intended) that contributed to the renaissance of number theory in the 1970s. I'm looking at quite a few classic papers where I don't see equivalent work in the 1950s-1960s. Did any particular event cause this? (The increasing availability of computers, perhaps?)

Among other references:

The preface of Vasilenko's Number-Theoretic Algorithms in Cryptography states:

This book deals with algorithmic number theory, a rapidly developing, especially in the last thirty years, branch of number theory, which has important applications to cryptography. Its explosive growth in the 1970s was related to the emergence of the Diffie-Hellman and RSA cryptosystems. By some estimates, practically the entire world's arsenal of asymmetric cryptography is based on number-theoretic techniques.

But that doesn't explain the earlier works of Pollard/Miller/etc.

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    $\begingroup$ Well, you're really just talking about "algorithmic number theory", not number theory more broadly. But/and, yes, in the 1970s the work of Shimura, Langlands, Deligne, Grothendieck, and many other luminaries did rejuvenate the subject. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday

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I would hypothesize, that a number of factors, perhaps interacting with each other, contributed:

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