Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What ...

Multiplying 2 x 2 is easy. But multiplying two numbers with more than a billion digits each — that takes some serious computation. The multiplication technique taught in grade school may be simple, ...

[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most recent discoveries ...

Multiplication is a fundamental skill in mathematics, but some number combinations can appear tricky. Imagine being able to quickly multiply numbers like 35 x 35 or 65 x 65 in your head, almost ...

Our February Insights puzzle sent readers on a treasure hunt based on complex numbers. First we provided a bit of a primer, demonstrating that complex numbers (expressions of the form a + bi, where ...