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 ...

The formulation of the binary number system essentially laid the groundwork for digital circuitry, computers, and the field of computer science, as we know it in today’s technologically-advanced world ...

Your computer uses ones and zeros to represent data. There’s no real reason for the basic unit of information in a computer to be only a one or zero, though. It’s a historical choice that is common ...

A computer is a programmable device that can automatically perform a sequence of calculations or other operations on data once programmed for the task. It can store, retrieve, and process data ...

Some of us might solve crossword puzzles or Sudoko games to exercise our minds, but [Nathan Nichols] plays with exotic number systems to keep the brain cells in shape. He wrote the Hanoi C99 library ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...