Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians ...

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?

Fractions, often perceived as daunting, become manageable with the right approach. Addition and subtraction require finding a common denominator, while multiplication involves directly multiplying ...

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 ...