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 ...

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?

A team of mathematicians from the University of New South Wales in Australia and the L’École Polytechnique in France has solved a decades-old maths riddle that allows multiplication of large numbers ...

break down (partition) a number using your understanding of place value recall times-tables up to 9 x 9 multiply by multiples of powers of ten Multiply each of these numbers by the 1-digit number and ...