If a positional numeral system is used, a natural way of multiplying numbers is taught in schools as long multiplication, sometimes called grade-school multiplication, sometimes called Standard Algorithm: multiply the multiplicand by each digit of the multiplier and then add up all the properly shifted results. It requires memorization of the multiplication table for single digits.
This is the usual algorithm for multiplying larger numbers by hand in base 10. Computers normally use a very similar shift and add algorithm in base 2. A person doing long multiplication on paper will write down all the products and then add them together; an abacus-user will sum the products as soon as each one is computed.
Read more about this topic: Multiplication Algorithm
Famous quotes containing the word long:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)