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 ...

As I told my class on Thursday, the theme of the first week of our math history course was “easy algebra is hard in base 60.” We started the semester in ancient Mesopotamia, trying to understand ...

For centuries, mathematicians tried to solve problems by adding new values to the usual numbers. Now they’re investigating the unintended consequences of that tinkering. In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved ...

Binary and hexadecimal numbers systems underpin the way modern computer systems work. Low-level interactions with hexadecimal (hex) and binary are uncommon in the world of Java programming, but ...

The residue number system (RNS) has emerged as a robust alternative to conventional binary arithmetic, offering significant advantages through its inherent parallelism. By representing numbers as a ...