> Shirley rejects Leibniz as the first creator of the binary system.<p>I think the idea of single-source attribution of relatively simple concepts is plain stupid. Any number of people could have made this up in a wide array of circumstances and for a similarly wide array of circumstances we may never know about it. For somewhat similar reasons a lower bar for patents has been established.
Then there is also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala</a> who is not even mentioned in the article. Whats up with that?
I've read that it may have had origins in African divination systems -- or at least that binary arithmetic was in use from West (Ife) to North (Egypt) Africa for centuries before Leibniz. (Eglash, R. 'African Influences in Cybernetics." In C.H. Gray (ed) The Cyborg Handbook. ) Eglash connected Leibniz to that African tradition via his interest in geomancy.
This article lost me after just the first couple of paragraphs. If Leibniz is, as quoted in the text, `recognized for first formally proposing` the binary system - then what relevance does it have that someone had the idea earlier (and thought it was useless)? He is not recognized for having had the idea first, he is recognized for seeing an application of it and formally proposing and specifying it.<p>Roentgen wasn't the first to observe x-rays either, he was the first to perform extensive studies and publications on them.
Binary numbers are written on the phonograph records sent with the Voyager spacecraft [1]. Perhaps twisted logic but if it's so universal that aliens can understand it, then I suppose other people than Leibniz could have invented it.<p>[1] <a href="https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-record/" rel="nofollow">https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-...</a>
Pluto and Charon alone were created billions of years before Leibniz, and many binary systems are even older. Not sure why this is a surprise to anyone.
the I ching: yin(0) and yang(1); 1000BC<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching</a>