Hello,

I wanted to send you an email and congratulate you on your very informative website. Do you know who invented binary? I have been trying to find this out for quite some time now and I cannot seem to find the answer anywhere.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Allan

It was Leibniz who first described the binary system. He was fascinated with the idea of God (1) creating everything out of nothing (0).

Check the first few links at

http://www.hotbot.lycos.com/?search=1&MT=Leibniz

where the fact is mentioned, or Encyclopedia Britannica:

All the best,
Alexander Bogomolny

Hello Alex,

I came across this pages which talks about binary and the Egyptians. http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/eghier.html

It's interesting.

All the best
Allan

Allan, thank you.

There is a remark on that page:

"Early Egyptian Hieroglyphic mathematics used
"decimal description, as we do now, and
"binary calculation, as do our computers,"

which is a little far fetched as the Egyptians did not have a positional system. I believe in Dantzig's "Numbers" he mentions an australian aborigine tribe who know to count to 6: 1, 2, 1-2, 2-2, 1-2-2, 2-2-2, many.

But the page and the links it provides are indeed interesting.

Thank you again,
Alexander Bogomolny