History of Binary Number

History of Binary Number

Overview

The binary number system is one of the most influential developments in the history of
technology. The formalization of the system and its additions and refinements over the course
of 200+ years ultimately led to the creation of electronic circuitry constructed using logic
gates. This creation ushered in the technological era and left the world forever changed.
Important figures in the history of the binary number system and mathematical logic and less
directly the history of computers and computer science include Gottfried Leibniz, George
Boole, Augustus De Morgan and Claude Shannon.

First Electronic computer Co-inventor of Calculus

In 1701, Gottfried Wilhelm

The first electronic computer Leibniz, the person who co-
- ENIAC which stood invented Calculus wrote a
for Electronic Numerical paper essay D'une Nouvelle
Integrator And Calculator Science Des Nombres about
his invention. The paper was
submitted to the Paris
Academy

Was built in 1946 at the

University of Pennsylvania,
it took another twenty years
but the invention of the
for the discovery to happen
binary system dates almost 3
just like it took a few
centuries back. the first
hundred years to develop
electronic computer was
a binary convertor.
invented seventy-one years
According to the available
ago.
literature on the subject,
1796 was the first time a
binary arithmetic entry was
reported.

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 History of Binary Number

History
The binary (numeral) system (or base 2 numerals) is a positional numeral system with a
radix of 2. It represents numeric values using two symbols and .

Gottfried Leibniz
The modern binary number system goes back to Gottfried Leibniz who in the 17th century
proposed and developed it in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire. Leibniz
invented the system around 1679 but he published it in 1703. He already used symbols 0 and
1. About the binary calculations he wrote ...these operations are so easy that we shall never
have to guess ar apply trial and error, as we must do in ordinary division. Nor do we need to
learn anything by rote... Leibniz even proposed the Duke of Brunswick to issue a silver
medal commemorating this discovery with the following inscriptions: The model of creation
discovered by G.W.L.and One is enough for deriving everything from nothing. Simon
Marquis de Laplace wrote: Laibnitz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation. He
imaginated that Unity represents God, and Zero the Void, that the Supreme Being drew all
beings from the void, just as unity and zero express all numbers in his system of numeration.

Ancient Egyptians
Actually the first application of the binary system is essentially older. The ancient Egyptians
used for multiplication of two numbers a procedure today known as the peasant
multiplication which basis is the expression of one factor in the binary system. Since they
were not interested in finding proofs justifying the used procedures, they were not awaken to
this connection.

Europe
In Europe it was Thomas Harriot (or Hariot or Harriott) (c. 1560 - July 2, 1621), an English
astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer, linguist and the founder of the English school of
algebra, who discovered the binary system. In the eight large volumes of Hariot’s
manuscripts kept in the British Museum fragmentary calculations, with occasional connected
notes on a diversity of subjects can be found.

Francis Bacon
In 1605 Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 - 9 April 1626) English philosopher and statesman,
developed a biliteral steganography method (a method of hiding a secret message as opposed
to a true cipher) in which each letter of the plain text is replaced by a group of five of the

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 History of Binary Number

letters ‘a’ or ‘b’. Actually he prepared a cipher scheme for handwritten capital and small
letters with each having two alternative forms, one to be used as and the other as (see an
illustrated plate in his De Augmentis Scientiarum (The Advancement of Learning), pp. 266-
270). Every letter in the extended alphabet was represented by a specific configuration of
these two letters in such a way that by replacing with zero and with 1, the letters
corresponded to the numbers 0 to 26 in our present-day binary notation. This is a
predecessor of the ASCI code. Bacon’s code is given by the table:

However, systems related to binary numbers have appeared earlier in multiple cultures
including ancient Egypt, China, and India. Leibniz was specifically inspired by the Chinese I
Ching.

The scribes of ancient Egypt
used two different systems for
their fractions,
• Fractions,Egyptian
fractions (not related to the
binary number system)
• Horus-Eye fractions are a
binary numbering system for
fractional quantities of grain,
liquids, or other measures, in • The method used for ancient
which a fraction of a hekat is
expressed as a sum of the
binary fractions 1/2, 1/4,
1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64.
1. Egypt
Early forms of this system can
be found in documents from
the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt,
approximately 2400 BC.
• its fully developed
hieroglyphic form dates to
the Nineteenth Dynasty of
Egypt, approximately 1200
BC.
Egyptian multiplication is
also closely related to binary
numbers.
In this method, multiplying one
number by a second is
performed by a sequence of
steps in which a value (initially
the first of the two numbers) is
either doubled or has the first
number added back into it; the
order in which these steps are
to be performed is given by the
binary representation of the
second number.
• This method can be seen in
use, for instance, in
the Rhind Mathematical
Papyrus, which dates to
around 1650 BC.

2. China
The I Ching dates from the 9th century BC in China. The binary notation in the I Ching is
used to interpret its quaternary divination technique.

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 History of Binary Number

 It is based on taoistic duality of yin and yang. eight trigrams (Bagua) and a set of 64
hexagrams ("sixty-four" gua), analogous to the three-bit and six-bit binary numerals,
were in use at least as early as the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China.
 The Song Dynasty scholar Shao Yong (1011–1077) rearranged the hexagrams in a
format that resembles modern binary numbers, although he did not intend his
arrangement to be used mathematically.
3. India

The Indian scholar Pingala (c. 2nd century BC) developed a binary system for describing
prosody. He used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in
length to two short syllables), making it similar to Morse code. They were known as laghu
(light) and guru (heavy) syllables.

4. Other Cultures

The residents of the island of Mangareva in French Polynesia were using a hybrid binary-
decimal system before 1450. Slit drums with binary tones are used to encode messages across
Africa and Asia. Sets of binary combinations similar to the I Ching have also been used in
traditional African divination systems such as Ifá as well as in medieval Western geomancy.

5. Western predecessors to Leibniz

In the late 13th century Ramon Llull had the ambition to account for all wisdom in every
branch of human knowledge of the time. For that purpose he developed a general method or
‘Ars generalis’ based on binary combinations of a number of simple basic principles or
categories, for which he has been considered a predecessor of computing science and
artificial intelligence.

 In 1605 Francis Bacon discussed a system whereby letters of the alphabet could be
reduced to sequences of binary digits, which could then be encoded as scarcely visible
variations in the font in any random text. Importantly for the general theory of binary
encoding, he added that this method could be used with any objects at all: "provided
those objects be capable of a twofold difference only; as by Bells, by Trumpets, by
Lights and Torches, by the report of Muskets, and any instruments of like nature".
 John Napier in 1617 described a system he called location arithmetic for doing binary
calculations using a non-positional representation by letters. Possibly the first
publication of the system in Europe was by Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, in 1700.

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 History of Binary Number

6. Leibniz and the I Ching

Leibniz studied binary numbering in 1679; his work appears in his article Explication de
l'Arithmétique Binaire (published in 1703) The full title of Leibniz's article is translated into
English as the "Explanation of Binary Arithmetic, which uses only the characters 1 and 0,
with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on the ancient Chinese figures
of Fu Xi". (1703). Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern binary numeral system. An
example of Leibniz's binary numeral system is as follows:

 0 0 0 1 numerical value 20
 0 0 1 0 numerical value 21
 0 1 0 0 numerical value 22
 1 0 0 0 numerical value 23

In 1854, British
mathematician George
Boole published a landmark
paper detailing
an algebraic system
of logic that would become
known as Boolean algebra.
His logical calculus was to
become instrumental in the
design of digital electronic
circuitry.
In 1937, Claude
Shannon produced his
master's thesis at MIT that
implemented Boolean
algebra and binary
arithmetic using electronic
relays and switches for the
first time in history.
Entitled A Symbolic Analysis
of Relay and Switching
Circuits, Shannon's thesis
essentially founded
practical digital
circuit design.
In November 1937, George
Stibitz, then working at Bell
Labs, completed a relay-
based computer he dubbed
the "Model K" (for
"Kitchen", where he had
assembled it), which
calculated using binary
addition. Bell Labs
authorized a full research
program in late 1938 with
Stibitz at the helm.

Later
Developments

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 History of Binary Number

Their Complex Number Computer, completed 8 January 1940, was able to calculate complex
numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth
College on 11 September 1940, Stibitz was able to send the Complex Number Calculator
remote commands over telephone lines by a teletype.

It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Some participants
of the conference who witnessed the demonstration were John von Neumann, John
Mauchly and Norbert Wiener, who wrote about it in his memoirs. The Z1 computer, which
was designed and built by Konrad Zuse between 1935 and 1938, used Boolean
logic and binary floating point numbers.

Advantage of the binary system

The advantage of the binary system is that it can be used to represent numbers in systems
(mechanisms) which are capable of being in two mutually exclusive states. This is the reason
that the binary system is used internally by all modern computers. However;

 The first prototype binary computer was built by John Atanasoff, a physics
professor at Iowa State College, in 1939.

 The Frenchman Raymond Louis André Valtat from Paris patented in 1932 in
Germany a calculator predicted on the binary system. In his paper he advocated the
usage of the binary system in a calculating apparatus in comparison to the decimal
system, for instance that the computation of a square root is especially simple in this
system.

In 1946 A.W.Burks, H.H.Goldstine

In 1936 Alan Turing designed and
and J. von Neumann published a
electromechanical multiplier. In
memorandum in which they
1938, the American George Stibitz
advocate abandoning the decimal
built a binary adder using
representation in favor of the
electromechanical relays.
binary system.