Mathematicians Develop New Algorithm for Multiplying Large Numbers | Mathematics - Sci-News.com

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 in a much faster time, by News Staff / Source.

Harvey & van der Hoeven cracked a maths problem that has stood for almost half a century which will enable computers to multiply huge numbers together much more quickly.
Photo: Gerd Altmann.

The team’s paper was published in the multi-disciplinary open access archive HAL.

More technically, we have proved a 1971 conjecture of Schönhage and Strassen about the complexity of integer multiplication,” said Dr. David Harvey, from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales.
“They predicted that there should exist an algorithm that multiplies n-digit numbers using essentially n * log(n) basic operations.”

“Our paper gives the first known example of an algorithm that achieves this.”
“In other words, if we were to multiply the numbers 314 by 159 with the usual primary school method, we would need to calculate 9 digit-by-digit products.”

A/Prof David Harvey explains new way of multiplying large numbers 


“In general, if n represents the number of digits in each number, the answer can be arrived at in n² operations.”...

But for numbers with enough digits — billion, trillions or even gazillions — the new algorithm, developed by Dr. Harvey and Dr. Joris van der Hoeven from the Laboratoire d’informatique at the L’École Polytechnique, would outrun even Schönhage and Strassen’s algorithm.
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Source: Sci-News.com and UNSW Science channel (YouTube)