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 ...

Mathematically inclined readers will immediately recognise that 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 are powers of two. One example is the earliest microcomputers in the late 1970s that used 8-bit chips. Since then, ...