Mathematicians Have Found a New Way to Multiply Two Numbers Together

Forget your times tables—mathematicians have found a new, faster way to multiply two numbers together. The method, which works only for whole numbers, is a landmark result in computer science. "This is big news," says Joshua Cooper at the University of South Carolina.

The new technique was devised by David Harvey at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Joris van der Hoeven at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris, France, and is described in "Integer Multiplication in Time O(n log n)."

From New Scientist
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