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 ...

In 1971, German mathematicians Schönhage and Strassen predicted a faster algorithm for multiplying large numbers, but it remained unproven for decades. Mathematicians from Australia and France have ...

Numberphile revived an ancient multiplication trick—halves and doubles—also called Egyptian or Russian math, where you repeatedly halve one number and double the other. After crossing out rows with ...

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 ...

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?