See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? Around 1956, the famous ...

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?

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 ...

A pair of researchers have found a more efficient way to multiply grids of numbers, beating a record set just a week ago by the artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. The company revealed on 5 October ...

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 ...

The new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks. DeepMind has used its board-game ...