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 ...

Just in time for Friday's $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot, I was contacted by something called Lotto N Crowd that says its proprietary algorithm can help customers pick winning numbers. Gracious ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

One of the curious properties of mathematics is its beauty. But exactly what mathematicians mean by beauty is hard to capture. Perhaps the most famous example is Euler’s relation, e iπ + 1 = 0, which ...

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 ...

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 ...

MIT’s Peter Shor explains why he devised an algorithm for a quantum computer that could unravel our online data encryption Internet security relies on the fact that our computers can’t break its ...