In the age of smartphone calculators and voice assistants, multiplying large numbers by hand may seem like a quaint and entirely unnecessary skill. However, you never know when you’ll need to do quick ...

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 ...

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?

This Design Idea presents a method for fast integer multiplying and multiplying by fractions. What can you do when you lack access to a hardware multiplier or MAC (multiply/accumulate) function and ...