This Number System Beats Binary, But Most Computers Can’t Use It Why do computers only work with the numbers 0 and 1? There are machines that process three digits with more efficiency than you ...

Mangareva Island Wikimedia Commons Binary, or base two, is the number system that computer systems use, as opposed to the decimal, or base ten, system used in our day-to-day lives.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...