Monday, 11 August 2008

Binary Number System | Boolean Algebra - Invention

There was once a person by the name of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German-born mathematician. In the late 1600s, he invented a unique number system consisting of only 1 and 0. It puzzled many people. Many did not know its usefulness.

"What is the use of number in base 2?" they remarked.

However the invention is not lost. The answer came 300 years later!

The usefulness of this base 2 number system named Binary System comes about when electricity was invented. Here the application matches the on-off nature of electricity. Light bulbs can be switched on and off and it can be signified by this 1 and 0 respectively.

Computer application in hardware and programming enhances this binary system usage later. Now this base 2 number system is a necessity in our life. Special class of maths in this area are developed to cover its applications.

Binary mathematically operations and number conversion to other base are explored. An extension of this binary maths is the Boolean Algebra. This is a special maths area where concepts differs from the conventional maths, and is more geared towards electrical /electronics engineering.

This area of math is geared more towards application-specific region, and its studies will be better appreciated through industrial projects or case studies.

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1 comment:

Solving Equations with Fractions said...

Logic is much like mathematics in this respect: the so-called "Laws" of logic depend on how we define what a proposition is.Boolean algebra is one of the most interesting and important algebraic structure which has significant applications in switching circuits, logic and many branches of computer science and engineering.