For thousands of years, ethiopian merchants used a very sophisticated system of multiplication to calculate the price of goods on markets throughout the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

In a reportage entitled "A Night Of Numbers - Go Forth And Multiply ", BBC 4 reveals how ethiopians used a similar mathematical approach to multiplications as modern computers do these days by using powers of two and additions, what is commonly known as the binary numeral system representing numeric values using 0 and 1. Watch BBC's reportage on YouTube .