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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]
The base-2 numeral system is a positional notation with a radix of 2.Each digit is referred to as a bit, or binary digit.Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used by almost all modern computers and computer-based devices, as a preferred system of use, over various other human techniques of communication, because ...
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.
For example, the base-8 numeral 23 8 contains two digits, "2" and "3", and with a base number (subscripted) "8". When converted to base-10, the 23 8 is equivalent to 19 10, i.e. 23 8 = 19 10. In our notation here, the subscript "8" of the numeral 23 8 is part of the numeral, but this may not always be the case.
For example, in base-2 scientific notation, the number 1001 b in binary (=9 d) is written as 1.001 b × 2 d 11 b or 1.001 b × 10 b 11 b using binary numbers (or shorter 1.001 × 10 11 if binary context is obvious).
Computer engineers often need to write out binary quantities, but in practice writing out a binary number such as 1001001101010001 is tedious and prone to errors. Therefore, binary quantities are written in a base-8, or "octal", or, much more commonly, a base-16, "hexadecimal" (hex), number format. In the decimal system, there are 10 digits, 0 ...
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.
The modern binary number system, the basis for binary code, is an invention by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 and appears in his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (English: Explanation of the Binary Arithmetic) which uses only the characters 1 and 0, and some remarks on its usefulness. Leibniz's system uses 0 and 1, like the modern ...