David Harvey receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Around 1956, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov conjectured that this is the best possible way to multiply two ...

19 is only 1 away from 20, so you prefer to start by multiplying 20 times 5, which equals 100. Then we need to take away a squadron of 5, because there are actually only 19 squadrons, not 20. 100 take ...

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 ...

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 ...