Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians ...

Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians invented multiplication. Last month, mathematicians perfected it. On March 18, two researchers described the fastest method ever discovered for multiplying two ...

Forget your times tables – mathematicians have found a new, faster way to multiply two numbers together. The method, which works only for whole numbers, is a landmark result in computer science. “This ...

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 ...

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 ...

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?

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 ...

A pair of researchers have found a more efficient way to multiply grids of numbers, beating a record set just a week ago by the artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. The company revealed on 5 October ...