Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz takes positional notation somewhere further: in 1703, he formally describes arithmetic in base 2 — binary.

He was reportedly delighted to find the same two-symbol logic echoed in the hexagrams of the I Ching, and saw in binary something close to a theological image: everything created from nothing (0) and unity (1).

Three centuries later, his once-mystical number system runs every computer on Earth.