For example, to multiply four-digit numbers, instead of needing 4 2 = 16 multiplications, Karatsuba's method gets away with only nine.

The secretary problem was tossed back and forth between mathematicians in the U.S. during the 1950s, and we don’t know who was first to solve it (though people suspect it was the American ...

So are humans and algorithms mutually exclusive then? Not necessarily! Consider that for many of us, the most familiar example of a machine-learning algorithm is probably the Facebook news feed.