Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods ...

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 ...

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?

Matrix multiplication is at the heart of many machine learning breakthroughs, and it just got faster—twice. Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix ...

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 ...

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, ...