The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

Binary and hexadecimal numbers systems underpin the way modern computer systems work. Low-level interactions with hexadecimal (hex) and binary are uncommon in the world of Java programming, but ...

A note from the Editor in Chief: Scientific American is celebrating its 166th year. Given its history as the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., it's probably no surprise that it has ...