Three, as Schoolhouse Rock! told children of the 1970s, is a magic number. Three little pigs; three beds, bowls and bears for Goldilocks; three Star Wars trilogies. You need at least three legs for a ...

Explore how Base I, the first real-time credit card authorization system, revolutionized transactions and paved the way for modern electronic payments.

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 ...

Some of us might solve crossword puzzles or Sudoko games to exercise our minds, but [Nathan Nichols] plays with exotic number systems to keep the brain cells in shape. He wrote the Hanoi C99 library ...

Most of us have little trouble working out how many millilitres are in 2.4 litres of water (it’s 2,400). But the same can’t be said when we’re asked how many minutes are in 2.4 hours (it’s 144).

Recent progress on the “sum product” problem recalls a celebrated mathematical result that revealed the power of miniature number systems. It’s one thing to turn a cartwheel in an open field. It’s ...

Jean-Charles Pelland's work has been made possible by financial support from the ‘QUANTA: Evolution of Cognitive Tools for Quantification’ project, which has received funding from the European ...

Most of us have little trouble working out how many milliliters are in 2.4 liters of water (it's 2,400). But the same can't be said when we're asked how many minutes are in 2.4 hours (it's 144).