John Napier was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who usually gets the credit for inventing logarithms. But his contributions to simplifying mathematics and building shorthand ...

Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. Around 1956, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov conjectured that this is the best ...

Most people know just one way to multiply two large numbers by hand. Typically, they learned it in elementary school. They’re often surprised to find that there are a variety of ways to do ...

Multiplying 2 x 2 is easy. But multiplying two numbers with more than a billion digits each — that takes some serious computation. The multiplication technique taught in grade school may be simple, ...

This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ? If you divide 8 by 2 first, you get 16, but if you multiply 2 by (2 + 2) first, you get 1. So, which answer is right?

Multiplication is a fundamental skill in mathematics, but some number combinations can appear tricky. Imagine being able to quickly multiply numbers like 35 x 35 or 65 x 65 in your head, almost ...