July 18, 2026
Multiply the drama
Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers
A 23-year-old shattered math’s rulebook, and the comments are fighting the explanation
TLDR: A young mathematician proved in 1960 that the school method isn’t the fastest way to multiply big numbers, and experts still don’t know the true speed limit. Commenters were torn between being amazed, frustrated by the article’s explanation, and confidently trying to out-explain the math themselves.
The big shocker here isn’t just that mathematicians still don’t know the absolute fastest way to multiply huge numbers—it’s that the old “line up the numbers and grind through it” method lost its crown decades ago thanks to a 23-year-old student, Anatoly Karatsuba, who basically walked into a seminar, told a famous professor he was wrong, and changed the game in a week. Naturally, the community ate up that part. The professor, Andrey Kolmogorov, was so stunned he reportedly wrote up the proof himself and published it with Karatsuba’s name on top. That’s the kind of academic plot twist commenters love.
But the real drama in the thread? People are split between “wow, this is mind-blowing” and “why does this article explain it so badly?” One reader flat-out complained that the piece seemed to just... stop mid-explanation, while another jumped in to rewrite the math more clearly, basically doing emergency cleanup in the comments. Others were thrilled by the bigger mystery: if today’s best known method is around “n times log n” in computer-science shorthand, is that the final boss, or is math still hiding an even faster trick?
And then came the classic comment-section chaos: one person casually suggested the whole thing seemed “obviously” simpler than experts claim, while another flexed real-world experience using fancy multiplication tricks on graphics chips. So yes, this is a story about numbers—but in the comments, it turned into a full-on mix of awe, confusion, correction, and low-key nerd warfare.
Key Points
- •The article says mathematicians still do not know the fastest possible method for multiplying large numbers.
- •It describes the standard grade-school multiplication method as having O(n²) computational complexity.
- •The article explains that multiplication efficiency matters for computing applications such as encryption, robotics, artificial intelligence, and audio processing.
- •In 1960, Andrey Kolmogorov proposed that O(n²) was a lower bound for multiplication speed, according to the article.
- •The article states that Anatoly Karatsuba disproved that conjecture by developing a faster method that replaces some multiplications with additions.