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 ...

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?

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 ...