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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new DNA computer calculates square roots of perfect squares up to 900. Like quantum computers, DNA computers are an exciting frontier of post-silicon computing. Where previous examples were up to 4 ...

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 ...