It’s a bit more complicated than this Phil Boorman/Getty
Forget your times tables – mathematicians have found a new, faster way to multiply two numbers together. The method, which works only for whole numbers, is a landmark result in computer science. “This is big news,” says Joshua Cooper at the University of South Carolina.
To understand the new technique, which was devised by David Harvey at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Joris van der Hoeven at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris, France, it helps to think back to the longhand …
Article amended on 11 April 2019
We corrected the number of digits in the smallest number for which the proof works
