We’ve often noted that whether had ancient man known binary, we could all count to 1023 on our fingers. We thought about that while watching [Numberphile’s] latest video about “Russian” multiplication ...

A viral TikTok video shows an old, unique way to multiply using sticks. The origins of the multiplication method aren't clear. It may come from China, Japan, or somewhere else. Whatever the roots, ...

Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. Around 1956, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov conjectured that this is the best ...

Mathematicians love a good puzzle. Even something as abstract as multiplying matrices (two-dimensional tables of numbers) can feel like a game when you try to find the most efficient way to do it.

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 ...