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 ...

French Scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace once said “The importance of Indian number system is that it gave humans the ability to add and subtract. This reason added weight to the fact that it was the ...

Editor’s note: “Behind the News” is the product of Sun staff assisted by the Sun’s AI lab, which includes a variety of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI, Google Gemini and ChatGPT. Dewey ...

To convert a decimal number to binary by repeated division, first subtract the largest possible power of two, and keep subtracting the next largest possible power form the remainder, marking 1 in each ...

Humans, for the most part, count in chunks of 10 — that’s the foundation of the decimal system. Despite its near-universal adoption, however, it’s a completely arbitrary numbering system that emerged ...

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 ...

The decimal point was invented around 150 years earlier than previously thought, according to an analysis of astronomical tables compiled by the Italian merchant and mathematician Giovanni Bianchini ...