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 ...

Microsoft Excel converts from binary to decimal notation using the BIN2DEC function and from decimal to binary using the DEC2BIN function.

Conversion of binary to decimal numbers is often needed in firmware. And it’s done easily enough if multiplication and division by ten are acceptable.

Why? Because it is simpler for computers to convert from binary and hexadecimal and vice versa, and it is significantly harder to do this with the commonly-used decimal number system.

Binary is a number system that only uses two digits, 0 and 1. It was invented by German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Binary code is used widely in computer programming, so it is ...

The use of binary numbers date back to ancient Egypt, but it was 17th-century philosopher and mathematician, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who created the current binary number system used today.

Unlike our everyday counting system that uses tens, binary uses just two numbers, 0 and 1. Learn more with BBC Bitesize. Suitable for KS3 students.