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 ...

While Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s work has influenced centuries of technological innovation, his own influences included Chinese philosophy and divination manuals recorded as early as 1000 BC. On ...

Every time Andy publishes a story, you’ll get an alert straight to your inbox! Enter your email By clicking “Sign up”, you agree to receive emails from Business ...

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 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 ...

Those ones and zeros might not look like anything to you, but in binary code the numbers are actually saying “Hello!” Any code that uses just two symbols to represent information is considered binary ...

Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But ...

Polynesian islanders spoke the language of computers centuries before the first programmer was born. It seems that inhabitants of Mangareva island in French Polynesia created their own particular ...