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 ...

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.

Matrix multiplication is at the heart of many machine learning breakthroughs, and it just got faster—twice. Last week, DeepMind announced it discovered a more efficient way to perform matrix ...