Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

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 ...

In this method the smaller number is partitioned (broken down into tens and units). \({27}\) is broken down into \({10}\), \({10}\) and \({7}\). The method of partitioning into tens, simplifies the ...

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?