Multiplication
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97 free Multiplication trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
14 free multiplication trivia questions with answers. Ready to multiply your knowledge? Our multiplication trivia quiz covers everything from basic times tables to fascinating mathematical facts and the history of multiplication. Whether you're a math enthusiast or looking to brush up on your arithmetic skills, this quiz will put your multiplication mastery to the test.
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Q 01Which property of multiplication says 3 × 4 and 4 × 3 give the same product, no matter the order?
Commutative Property
Commutative Property, from the Latin commutare, 'to exchange': swapping the order of the factors never changes the product, so 3 × 4 and 4 × 3 are both 12.
Q 02What do you call the result of multiplying two or more numbers?
Product
Product is the result of multiplying: 3 × 4 gives the product 12, just as 3 + 4 gives the sum 7 and 12 ÷ 4 gives the quotient 3.
Q 03What are the numbers being multiplied together called?
Factors
Factors, from the Latin for 'maker': in 3 × 4 = 12, the factors 3 and 4 make the product 12.
Q 04Which property says (2 × 3) × 4 and 2 × (3 × 4) give the same result, whatever the grouping?
Associative
Associative, because it's about how factors associate in groups; commutative is about their order.
Q 05Which property of multiplication lets a(b + c) be expanded to ab + ac?
Distributive Property
The Distributive Property spreads a factor across every term in the brackets; it's why 7 × 12 can be done as 7 × 10 plus 7 × 2.
Q 06Which mathematician is widely credited with introducing the '×' symbol for multiplication in 1631?
William Oughtred
William Oughtred used × in his 1631 algebra text Clavis Mathematicae, a compact Latin treatise that also introduced the :: sign for proportion.
Q 07Which multiplication method, also called the Italian or gelosia method, writes the digits round a box of cells and sums its diagonals?
Lattice
Lattice multiplication breaks a big product into one-digit products inside the cells, then sums each diagonal with carries.
Q 08Which civilization multiplied by 'doubling and halving' using powers of two?
Egyptian
Egyptian scribes split one factor into powers of two and doubled the other, essentially binary arithmetic thousands of years before computers.
Q 09Which number is the multiplicative identity, leaving any number multiplied by it unchanged?
1
Multiplying any number by 1 leaves it unchanged, which is why 1 is called the multiplicative identity; 0 plays the same role for addition.
Q 10Which result states every integer over 1 is prime or a unique product of primes, up to order?
The fundamental theorem of arithmetic
The fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every integer above 1 is a product of primes in exactly one way up to order, so 12 is 2 × 2 × 3 and nothing else.
Q 11Which easier operation do logarithm tables let you substitute for multi-digit multiplication?
Addition
Addition: since log(ab) = log a + log b, you add the two logarithms from the table and look up the antilog to get the product; division becomes subtraction.
Q 12Which Scottish mathematician built numbered calculating rods and named the technique rabdology?
John Napier
John Napier described the rods in his book Rabdologiae; each rod carries one column of a multiplication table, reducing multiplying to a series of additions and dividing to subtractions.
Q 13Which hand-operated calculator uses logarithmic scales to multiply and divide?
The slide rule
Q 21The Chinese eighty-one-sentence rhyme for learning products was historically known by what name?
The nine-nine table
The nine-nine table: in ancient times the rhyme began with 'nine nines are eighty-one' and counted down, which is where the name comes from.
Q 22Which algebraic property says that if ab = 0 then a or b is 0?
Zero-product property
The zero-product property: a product is zero only when a factor is zero, which is why solving (x − 2)(x + 5) = 0 gives x = 2 or x = −5.
Q 23In what year did John Napier publish his description of the calculating rods now called Napier's bones?
1617
1617: Rabdologiae came out three years after his 1614 logarithms, and Napier dedicated it to his patron Alexander Seton, Chancellor of Scotland.
The slide rule: moving one logarithmic scale along another adds the logarithms of two numbers, and the sum of the logarithms is the logarithm of the product.
Q 14In which year did Anatoly Karatsuba discover the first multiplication method faster than the grade-school one?
1960
1960: Karatsuba, then a student, found his divide-and-conquer method that year; it was published in 1962 and was the first method to beat the schoolbook n² bound.
Q 15The oldest known multiplication tables, from about 4,000 years ago, were used by which civilization?
The Babylonians
The Babylonians: Old Babylonian clay tablets from about 1800 BC carry multiplication tables in their base-60 system, where a complete table would need some 3,600 entries.
Q 16The world's earliest known decimal multiplication table, dated to 305 BC, was written on what?
Bamboo slips
The 21 slips are part of the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips collection from China's Warring States period.
Q 17In French, Italian and Russian, the multiplication table is named after which Greek?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras: French 'table de Pythagore' and Italian 'tavola pitagorica' keep his name, though the attribution is traditional rather than proven; the oldest surviving Greek table dates from the 1st century AD.
Q 18The oldest surviving Greek multiplication table, on a 1st-century AD wax tablet, is housed where?
The British Museum
The British Museum houses the 1st-century AD tablet; wax tablets were the reusable notebooks of the ancient world, which is why so few survive at all.
Q 19Which property says the product of any two integers is itself an integer?
Closure
Closure: the integers are closed under multiplication, so 7 × (−3) = −21 stays an integer, whereas they are not closed under division, since 7 ÷ 3 is not.
Q 20In 1820, John Leslie recommended pupils memorize the times table up to what?
50 × 50
50 × 50: John Leslie's Philosophy of Arithmetic (1820) urged pupils to learn that far, and printed a full table up to 99 × 99 so numbers could be multiplied two digits at a time.
Q 24In Napier's original design, his calculating rods had what cross-section?
Square
Square: each of the four faces of a rod carried a different table, so a set of ten rods held forty tables.
Q 25Napier's Rabdology, describing his calculating rods, was printed in which city?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh: Andrew Hart printed Rabdologiae there in 1617, and Napier was Laird of Merchiston, then just outside the city.
Q 26Beyond multiplying and dividing, advanced use of Napier's rods lets a user do what?
Extract square roots
Extract square roots: Rabdologiae supplies an extra rod marked with squares so a user can pull square roots digit by digit; the rods are not logarithms.
Q 27Who, in 1698, proposed a middle dot for multiplication because × looked too much like x?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in a 1698 letter to Johann Bernoulli, wrote that × was easily confounded with x and that he preferred an interposed dot, as in ZC·LM.
Q 28In computer programming, which symbol is the usual notation for multiplication?
The asterisk
The asterisk was on every keyboard when ASCII and EBCDIC had no × or dot, so 5*2 stuck.
Q 29In Germany, which symbol is the primary way to write multiplication?
The dot operator ⋅
The dot operator ⋅, the German Malpunkt: schoolbooks write 3 ⋅ 4 = 12, keeping × for vector products and dimensions; the same dot appears in SI units such as N⋅m.
Q 30Which ancient Egyptian text is the chief source for the doubling-and-adding method of multiplication?
The Rhind Papyrus
The Rhind Papyrus (c. 1550 BC) shows the method: to compute 13 × 21 a scribe doubled 21 repeatedly and added the rows for 1, 4 and 8.