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 ...

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 ...

Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. But is this really the best way to multiply two big numbers together? Around 1956, the famous ...