You can use this method to multiply long numbers together. The key insight you need is that polynomial multiplication is the same as normal long number multiplication without doing carrying. So suppose you have a 1000 digit number. You then take each digit and use it as the coefficient of a 1000 element polynomial. You can then multiply these polynomials together using the fft method as described in the article. To c…
Thanks for the comment. That makes sense, since as you are saying, a base10 number can be expressed as a polynomial where x=10. Eg: 983 = 9x^2 + 8x + 3 aka [9, 8, 3]. Wondering how big the number has to be to make sense, and where this is used in practice.
https://gmplib.org/manual/Multiplication-Algorithms
GMP has lots of other methods in between schoolbook multiplication and FFT multiplication. A nice one is Karatsuba multiplication which is very easy to understand and delivers O(n^1.58) rather than O(n^2) performance. Python uses this method for multiplying large numbers together