Ancient people in China began to use the decimal notation system very early, which included numerical symbols: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred million, trillion, etc. In addition, there are three symbol systems that are closely related to traditional China thought, culture and life-the heavenly stems, the earth branches and the eight trigrams.
There are 10 symbols in the sky: A, B, C, D, V, Ji, G, Xin, Ren, and Gui. There are 12 symbols in the earth branch (commonly represented by 12 animals): Zi (mouse), Chou (cow), Yin (tiger), Mao (rabbit), Chen (dragon), Si (snake), Wu (horse), Wei (sheep), Shen (monkey), You (chicken), Xu (dog), Hai (pig). The celestial stems and the earth branches are mainly used to express sequence, timing and year counting.
The Eight Trigrams are unique to ancient China and are perhaps the oldest and most mysterious symbol system. It is said that in ancient times, Fuxi "looked up at astronomy and geography" and discovered the truth that yin and yang of all things generated and suppressed each other, and made the Eight Trigrams. In fact, the Eight Trigrams were symbols used by the ancients to record the results of divination. Its basic structural component "line" is similar to yarrow grass, a divination tool. A line has two forms: "Yang"(represented by a long horizontal stroke) and "Yin"(represented by two short horizontal strokes). The three lines are put together to form a "hexagram", so there are a total of 2^3 =8 hexagram types. Because the eight trigrams appeared before the words, there was no divinatory name at the beginning. Later generations added the names of the hexagrams for ease of use: Qian, Dui, Li, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Gen, Kun.
Overlap the eight trigrams in pairs to form sixty-four trigrams. Diviners use these sixty-four hexagrams to explain everything and predict disaster, good fortune, and evil. The Book of Changes, compiled and handed down by Confucius and his students, is an ancient book that explains the sixty-four hexagrams. If we think of the positive line as "1" and the negative line as "0", we see that the Eight Diagrams correspond to 3-digit binary numbers, while the sixty-four hexagrams correspond to 6-digit binary numbers.
In 1679, the German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz wrote an article entitled "Binary Arithmetic", which gave for the first time a relatively complete description of binary numbers and their operations, explaining that the binary number formed by the permutation of 1s and 0s can represent any integer like decimal numbers. Leibniz later learned about the Eight Trigrams of the Book of Changes from European missionaries who had visited China, and was amazed at its similarity to binary numbers. In terms of using the binary form of symbols to represent things, the eight trigrams are the same as binary numbers. Therefore, it can be said that it was China who first proposed the idea of binary.