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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the great mathematician and pioneer of computer science and binary number calculations. © University of Massachusetts Lowell Binary ...