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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When anyone is first introduced to the topic of digital computers, they are almost invariably told that these machines are based on binary (base-2) logic and the binary number system, where “binary” ...

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 is a number system that only uses two digits, \(0\) and \(1\). It was invented by German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Binary code is used widely in computer programming, so it is ...

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 ...