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, with ...

In positional systems, as mentioned earlier, the number represented is multiplied by the base each time you move to the left of a position and is always divided by the base each time you move to the ...

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 ...