To multiply two numbers by hand takes a few steps but it's something we're taught in school. When dealing with big numbers, really big numbers, we need to a quicker way to do things.

To help you understand the algorithm, the video shows a simple two-digit by two-digit multiplication. You can see that the first and last digits are essentially the result of one multiplication.

Even for computers, the long multiplication algorithm, defined as n to the power of, could reportedly take months if each number had a billion digits.

What do encrypted messages, recognizing speech commands and running simulations to predict the weather have in common? They all rely on matrix multiplication for accurate calculations. DeepMind, an ...

High-performance matrix multiplication remains a cornerstone of numerical computing, underpinning a wide array of applications from scientific simulations to machine learning. Researchers ...

See all Abstractions blog Even more important, the multiplication algorithm is part of a class of nearly ubiquitous algorithms in computer science. Gidney expects that his new technique will allow ...