Binary — thinking in 2s

Binary is a number system used lots in computers.

To understand it we first need to look at how we generally treat numbers in the world which is denary.

Denary (sometimes called decimal) is a way of representing all numbers with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9.

So if we look at the number 33,179. Each column from right to left represents 1s, 10s, 100s, 1000s etc. Each column a multiple of ten of the previous one.

So with binary we can represent all numbers using only 0 and 1.

Because we only have two numbers each column will start with 1s, then 2s, then 4s etc.

So if we wanted to represent the number 23 it would look like this.

I’ve found these resources for children incredibly helpful in how to think about binary. So funny how we put so much effort into making things accessible for children but make them dense and boring for adults. https://csunplugged.org/en/topics/binary-numbers/unit-plan/how-binary-digits-work-junior/ They use a great lightbulb analogy for representing the number 3