There was a discussion here about the value of a liberal arts education vs a narrow technical one.
According to this article the mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is said to have invented the binary number system based on reading the 5000 year old I Ching, also known as the Book of Changes.
“Is it is or is it ain’t” (one or zero) comes from the Alan Watts video at the linked article.
And all these operations are so easy that there would never be any need to guess or try out anything, as has to be done in ordinary division. There would no longer be any need to learn anything by heart, as has to be done in ordinary reckoning, where one has to know, for example, that 6 and 7 taken together make 13, and that 5 multiplied by 3 gives 15, in accordance with the Table of one times one is one, which is called Pythagorean.1 But here, all of that is found and proved from the source, as is clear in the preceding examples under the signs and .
However I am not in any way recommending this way of counting in order to introduce it in place of the ordinary practice of counting by ten. For, aside from the fact that we are accustomed to this, we have no need to learn what we have already learned by heart. The practice of counting by ten is shorter and the numbers not as long. And if we were accustomed to proceed by twelves or sixteens, there would be even more of an advantage.
Of course even with easy operations doing arithmetic in binary would be unbearably tedious for humans. Imagine working with numbers to four decimal places? That would be ten bits just for the fractional part.
Yes, it would get tedious, you’d have to invent some device to do it for you. Some sort of device that could follow a few very simple rules, many times.
The step reckoner (or stepped reckoner ) was a digitalmechanical calculator invented by the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz around 1672 and completed in 1694.[1] The name comes from the translation of the German term for its operating mechanism, Staffelwalze , meaning ‘stepped drum’. It was the first calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations.[2]
Obviously not practical, Roman Numerals don’t have a zero, the system has an “is” but it doesn’t have an “ain’t”. Being and nothingness, got to have both.
and
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