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"A base is a natural number B whose powers (B multiplied by itself some number of times) are specially designated within a numerical system." [1]: 38 The term is not equivalent to radix, as it applies to all numerical notation systems (not just positional ones with a radix) and most systems of spoken numbers. [1]
Radices are usually natural numbers. However, other positional systems are possible, for example, golden ratio base (whose radix is a non-integer algebraic number), [5] and negative base (whose radix is negative). [6] A negative base allows the representation of negative numbers without the use of a minus sign. For example, let b = −10.
For example, "11" represents the number eleven in the decimal or base-10 numeral system (today, the most common system globally), the number three in the binary or base-2 numeral system (used in modern computers), and the number two in the unary numeral system (used in tallying scores). The number the numeral represents is called its value.
In books and articles, when using initially the written abbreviations of number bases, the base is not subsequently printed: it is assumed that binary 1111011 is the same as 1111011 2. The base b may also be indicated by the phrase "base-b". So binary numbers are "base-2"; octal numbers are "base-8"; decimal numbers are "base-10"; and so on.
A binary number uses only two different digits, but it needs a lot of digits for representing a number; base 10 writes shorter numbers, but it needs 10 different digits to write them. The balance between those is base e, which therefore would store numbers optimally.
Base −r representation may of course be carried beyond the radix point, allowing the representation of non-integer numbers. As with positive-base systems, terminating representations correspond to fractions where the denominator is a power of the base; repeating representations correspond to other rationals, and for the same reason.
The unary numeral system is the simplest numeral system to represent natural numbers: [1] to represent a number N, a symbol representing 1 is repeated N times. [2]In the unary system, the number 0 (zero) is represented by the empty string, that is, the absence of a symbol.
Hexadecimal: Base 16, widely used by computer system designers and programmers, as it provides a more human-friendly representation of binary-coded values. Octal: Base 8, occasionally used by computer system designers and programmers. Duodecimal: Base 12, a numeral system that is convenient because of the many factors of 12.