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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The decimal system of counting is part of our language, math, and the measurement units used by all right-thinking nations. It's so deeply engrained in how we operate that it's often difficult to ...

Most novelists don’t write code. Still fewer teach it. But Gene Luen Yang is a rarity: a nationally renowned writer with a techie past and an endless appetite for education. He's taught computer ...

When Alan Turing submitted his paper On Computable Numbers to the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society on this day, May 28, in 1936, he could not have guessed that it would lead not only to ...

Scientists have made a quantum computer that breaks free from the binary system. Computers as we know them today rely on binary information: they operate in ones and zeroes, storing more complex ...

It’s almost time to celebrate George Boole’s 200th birthday. Or maybe we should call it Birthday No. 11001000. You might have a hard time converting that binary number to decimal in your head. But it ...