Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

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 ...

People tend to obsess over making computer software faster. You can, of course, just crank up the clock speed and add more processors, but often the most powerful way to make something faster is to ...

Marty is going to be working at the zoo for a whole year, that’s 365 days! But once every week, that is once in every seven days, his cap gets stolen. How many caps is Marty going to need, Suki? You ...

This Design Idea presents a method for fast integer multiplying and multiplying by fractions. What can you do when you lack access to a hardware multiplier or MAC (multiply/accumulate) function and ...

Computer scientists are a demanding bunch. For them, it’s not enough to get the right answer to a problem — the goal, almost always, is to get the answer as efficiently as possible. Take the act of ...