Related Classes: EECS 370, EECS 376
Think of any number, . You might be thinking of seventeen, or twenty-five, or even sixty-nine. But what does this number represent? All it is fundamentally representing is a quantity, an amount of something.
This quantity can be written, or displayed, in many ways. These different portrayals are called Bases.
Decimal
The most commonly used number base is Base-10, more commonly referred to as decimal. We have ten fingers, ten toes, and we have ten different digits to represent numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And that’s what decimal is all about: we can use these ten different digits to represent any quantity: seventeen is 17, twenty-five is 25, and sixty-nine is 69.
Binary
The second most commonly seen number base is Base-2, or binary. This is what all modern standard computers are built off of, or based on. Here, we only use the digits 1, 0 to represent any number. seventeen would be 10001, twenty-five would be 11001, and sixty-nine is 1000101.