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 ...

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 ...

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Binary code is the language of computers and electronic devices. The use of binary numbers date back to ancient Egypt, but it was 17th-century philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ...

Conversion of binary to decimal numbers is often needed in firmware. And it’s done easily enough if multiplication and division by ten are acceptable. However, these operations, especially division, ...

The natives of a remote Polynesian Island invented a binary number system, similar to the one used by computers to calculate, centuries before Western mathematicians did, new research suggests. The ...

Binary and hexadecimal numbers systems underpin the way modern computer systems work. Low-level interactions with hexadecimal (hex) and binary are uncommon in the world of Java programming, but ...

While Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s work has influenced centuries of technological innovation, his own influences included Chinese philosophy and divination manuals recorded as early as 1000 BC. On ...

The natives of a remote Polynesian Island invented a binary number system, similar to the one used by computers to calculate, centuries before Western mathematicians did, new research suggests. The ...