We’ve often noted that whether had ancient man known binary, we could all count to 1023 on our fingers. We thought about that while watching [Numberphile’s] latest video about “Russian” multiplication ...

Numberphile revived an ancient multiplication trick—halves and doubles—also called Egyptian or Russian math, where you repeatedly halve one number and double the other. After crossing out rows with ...

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, ...