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 ...

What are you like at multiplications? Chances are if you're a mere mortal 2, 5s and 10s won't seem too taxing. But when it comes to figuring out what 42x21 is, you may wish somebody had shown you the ...

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?