In elementary school, we all learned how to multiply numbers. What’s the big deal, right?
As our lives become more digital, multiplying numbers are essential to fields such as cryptography and artificial intelligence. Any improvements to our multiplication abilities can lead to new technical advancements!
Like most folks, I never gave much thought on making multiplication faster. We all learned it as kids, and we now have computers for this sort of stuff. That is, until recently, where I learned about Karatsuba’s method on YouTube.
If you are into numbers, computer algorithms, or simply a curious person, I hope I can take you on a fun journey into my interpretation of the Karatsuba method.
Early computers performed multiplication the same way humans have done for centuries. Multiplying 2 digit numbers required 2 squared, or 4 multiplications, followed by some addition. For large numbers, like 100 digits, that would be 100 squared or 10,000+ computations! In computer science, we would say the computation complexity is N squared, or O(N²).
