The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

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It’s hard to believe today, but in the 1940s, the earliest computer technicians actually worked at the bit level. If a computer made a mistake and the technician determined it wasn’t from a burned-out ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. They find that the former Mangarevans combined base-10 ...

Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But ...

In the late 1930s, Claude Shannon showed that by using switches that close for "true" and open for "false," it was possible to carry out logical operations by assigning the number 1 to "true" and 0 ...