unit 2 lesson 1

Question 1

Bright idea 1#

Answer 1

In 1679, Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary number system that uses only two characters—0 and 1—instead of the decimal system that uses numbers 0 through 9.

Question 2

Bright idea 2#

Answer 2

In 1605, Francis Bacon worked out that letters of the alphabet could be reduced to sequences of binary digits. This is how ‘hello’ is written using the binary number system: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111.

Question 3

Bright idea 3#

Answer 3

George Boole devised a form of algebra that encoded logic in terms of two states—true or false, yes or no, one or zero. If expressed that way, practically any mathematical or logical problem could be solved by just three basic operations, dubbed ‘and,’ ‘or,’ and ‘not.’

Question 4

Bright idea 4#

Answer 4

During the late 1930s, several researchers realized that Boole’s operations could be given physical form as arrangements of switches—a switch being a two-state device, on or off.

Question 5

Bright idea 5#

Answer 5

In 1939, John Atanasoff, a physicist at Iowa State College, constructed a rudimentary binary machine, and around the same time Konrad Zuse built a programmable calculator in Germany. It used Boole’s Boolean logic together with Leibniz’s binary numbers to store numbers representing information, or data and performed very simple mathematical operations.