Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.
Buddha
The binary numeral system (or base 2 numerals), is a positional numeral system with a radix of 2. It represents numeric values using two symbols—0 and 1. The advantage of the binary system is that it can represent numbers in systems (mechanisms) capable of being in two mutually exclusive states. This is the reason that the binary system is used internally by all modern computers.
Using the binary system for counting is not a new idea. The ancient Egyptians used for the multiplication of two numbers a procedure today known as peasant multiplication, which basis is the expression of one factor in the binary system. The advantage of this variant of multiplication used in old Egypt already in the 18th century BC, is that it does not require the knowledge of the whole multiplication table. Pingala, an otherwise-obscure Indian author, wrote about 300 B.C. Chandahsastra, or Science of Meters. In this treatise, the author used a binary logic system (short-long, in this case, rather than 0-1) to explore meter in poetry.
In Europe, it was Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer, linguist, and the founder of the English school of algebra, who rediscovered the binary system around 1604.
With regard to Harriot’s invention of binary, of particular interest is one manuscript (see the nearby image) (there are eight large volumes of Hariot’s manuscripts kept in the British Museum) that contains a record of a weighing experiment at the top, and examples of binary notation and arithmetic at the bottom. Here Harriot sketched a table of the decimal numbers 1 to 16 in binary notation and worked out three examples of multiplication in binary: 109 × 109 = 11881, 13 × 13 = 169, and 13 × 3 = 39.
Yet Harriot was sufficiently intrigued by his new number system to explore it over a further four manuscript pages, working out how to do three of the four basic arithmetic operations (all but division) in binary notation. On one sheet, Harriot wrote examples of binary addition (equivalent to 59 + 119 = 178 and 55 + 114 = 169) and subtraction (equivalent to 178 – 59 = 119 and 169 – 55 = 114) and the same example of multiplication in binary (109 × 109) as above, this time solved in two different ways.
On a different sheet, Harriot converted binary 1101101 to 109, calling the process “reduction,” and then worked through the reciprocal process, called “conversion,” of 109 to 1101101.
Reductio
1101101
64
32
8
4
1
---
109
On yet another sheet, Harriot logged a table of 0 to 16 in binary, a simple binary sum: 100000 + [0]1[00]1[0] = 110010 (in decimal, 32 + 19 = 51), and another example of multiplication, 101 × 111 = 100011 (5 × 7 = 35). On a different sheet, he gave several examples of multiplication in binary (equivalent to 3 × 3 = 9; 7 × 7 = 49; and 45 × 11 = 495) and produced a simple algebraic representation of the first few terms of the powers of 2 geometric sequence.
Unfortunately, despite his great insight, Harriot did not publish any of his work on binary, and his manuscripts remained unpublished until quite recently, being scanned and put online as late as 2012. Although he rightly deserves the accolade of inventing binary many years before Napier‘s chessboard calculator and Leibniz‘s De Progressione Dyadica, Harriot’s work on it remained unknown until 1922, and so did not influence Leibniz or anyone else, nor did it play any part in the adoption of binary as computer arithmetic in the early 1930s.