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 ...

Decimal notation describes numbers using the digits 1 through 10. Binary notation describes them using just two digits, 1 and 0, where each bit in a string represents a power of 2. The right-most bit ...

Consider a simple black-and-white image. If 0 is black (or on) and 1 is white (or off), then a simple black-and-white picture can be created using binary. In a low-resolution image, the pixels are ...

Memo to the developers of superfast quantum computers: give up on the familiar 1s-and-0s binary system used in conventional computers. By switching to a novel five-state system, you will find it ...

Because computers don't understand words or phrases in the same way people can, they speak a language of their own, using only two symbols: 0 and 1. This computing parlance is known as binary code, ...

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 ...