Numeral system

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This article is about different methods of expressing numbers with symbols. For the classification of numbers in mathematics, see Number system. For how numbers are expressed using words, see Numeral (linguistics).

A numeral system (or system of numeration) is a writing system for expressing numbers; that is, a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using digits or other symbols in a consistent manner. It can be seen as the context that allows the symbols "11" to be interpreted as the binary symbol for three, the decimal symbol for eleven, or a symbol for other numbers in different bases.

The number the numeral represents is called its value.

Ideally, a numeral system will:

  • Reflect the algebraic and arithmetic structure of the numbers.

For example, the usual decimal representation of whole numbers gives every nonzero whole number a unique representation as a finite sequence of digits, beginning by a non-zero digit. However, when decimal representation is used for the rational or real numbers, such numbers in general have an infinite number of representations, for example 2.31 can also be written as 2.310, 2.3100000, 2.309999999..., etc., all of which have the same meaning except for some scientific and other contexts where greater precision is implied by a larger number of figures shown.


Main numeral systems[edit]




More useful still are systems which employ special abbreviations for repetitions of symbols; for example, using the first nine letters of the alphabet for these abbreviations, with A standing for "one occurrence", B "two occurrences", and so on, one could then write C+ D/ for the number 304. This system is used when writing Chinese numerals and other East Asian numerals based on Chinese. The number system of the English language is of this type ("three hundred [and] four"), as are those of other spoken languages, regardless of what written systems they have adopted. However, many languages use mixtures of bases, and other features, for instance 79 in French is soixante dix-neuf (60 + 10 + 9) and in Welsh is pedwar ar bymtheg a thrigain (4 + (5 + 10) + (3 × 20)) or (somewhat archaic) pedwar ugain namyn un (4 × 20 − 1). In English, one could say "four score less one", as in the famous Gettysburg Address representing "87 years ago" as "four score and seven years ago".

More elegant is a positional system, also known as place-value notation. Again working in base 10, ten different digits 0, ..., 9 are used and the position of a digit is used to signify the power of ten that the digit is to be multiplied with, as in 304 = 3×100 + 0×10 + 4×1 or more precisely 3×102 + 0×101 + 4×100. Note that zero, which is not needed in the other systems, is of crucial importance here, in order to be able to "skip" a power. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which originated in India and is now used throughout the world, is a positional base-10 system.

Arithmetic is much easier in positional systems than in the earlier additive ones; furthermore, additive systems need a large number of different symbols for the different powers of 10; a positional system needs only ten different symbols (assuming that it uses base 10).

Positional decimal system is presently universally used in human writing. The base 1000 is also used, by grouping the digits and considering a sequence of three decimal digits as a single digit. This is the meaning of the common notation 1,000,234,567 used for very large numbers.

In computers, the main numeral systems are based on the positional system in base 2 (binary numeral system), with two binary digits, 0 and 1. Positional systems obtained by grouping binary digits by three (octal numeral system) or four (hexadecimal numeral system) are commonly used. For very large integers, bases 232 or 264 (grouping binary digits by 32 or 64, the length of the machine word) are used, as, for example, in GMP.

The numerals used when writing numbers with digits or symbols can be divided into two types that might be called the arithmetic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) and the geometric numerals (1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 ...), respectively. The sign-value systems use only the geometric numerals and the positional systems use only the arithmetic numerals. A sign-value system does not need arithmetic numerals because they are made by repetition (except for the Ionic system), and a positional system does not need geometric numerals because they are made by position. However, the spoken language uses both arithmetic and geometric numerals.

In certain areas of computer science, a modified base-k positional system is used, called bijective numeration, with digits 1, 2, ..., k (k ≥ 1), and zero being represented by an empty string. This establishes a bijection between the set of all such digit-strings and the set of non-negative integers, avoiding the non-uniqueness caused by leading zeros. Bijective base-k numeration is also called k-adic notation, not to be confused with p-adic numbers. Bijective base-1 is the same as unary.

Positional systems in detail[edit]

In a positional base-b numeral system (with b a natural number greater than 1 known as the radix), b basic symbols (or digits) corresponding to the first b natural numbers including zero are used. To generate the rest of the numerals, the position of the symbol in the figure is used. The symbol in the last position has its own value, and as it moves to the left its value is multiplied by b.

For example, in the decimal system (base 10), the numeral 4327 means (4×103) + (3×102) + (2×101) + (7×100), noting that 100 = 1.

In general, if b is the base, one writes a number in the numeral system of base b by expressing it in the form anbn + an − 1bn − 1 + an − 2bn − 2 + ... + a0b0 and writing the enumerated digits anan − 1an − 2 ... a0 in descending order. The digits are natural numbers between 0 and b − 1, inclusive.

If a text (such as this one) discusses multiple bases, and if ambiguity exists, the base (itself represented in base 10) is added in subscript to the right of the number, like this: numberbase. Unless specified by context, numbers without subscript are considered to be decimal.

By using a dot to divide the digits into two groups, one can also write fractions in the positional system. For example, the base-2 numeral 10.11 denotes 1×21 + 0×20 + 1×2−1 + 1×2−2 = 2.75.

In general, numbers in the base b system are of the form:

The numbers bk and bk are the weights of the corresponding digits. The position k is the logarithm of the corresponding weight w, that is . The highest used position is close to the order of magnitude of the number.

The number of tally marks required in the unary numeral system for describing the weight would have been w. In the positional system, the number of digits required to describe it is only , for k ≥ 0. For example, to describe the weight 1000 then four digits are needed because . The number of digits required to describe the position is (in positions 1, 10, 100,... only for simplicity in the decimal example).

Position 3 2 1 0 −1 −2 . . .
Decimal example weight 1000 100 10 1 0.1 0.01 . . .
Decimal example digit 4 3 2 7 0 0 . . .

Note that a number has a terminating or repeating expansion if and only if it is rational; this does not depend on the base. A number that terminates in one base may repeat in another (thus 0.310 = 0.0100110011001...2). An irrational number stays aperiodic (with an infinite number of non-repeating digits) in all integral bases. Thus, for example in base 2, π = 3.1415926...10 can be written as the aperiodic 11.001001000011111...2.

Putting overscores, n, or dots, , above the common digits is a convention used to represent repeating rational expansions. Thus:

14/11 = 1.272727272727... = 1.27   or   321.3217878787878... = 321.32178.

If b = p is a prime number, one can define base-p numerals whose expansion to the left never stops; these are called the p-adic numbers.

Generalized variable-length integers[edit]

More general is using a mixed radix notation (here written little-endian) like for , etc.

This is used in punycode, one aspect of which is the representation of a sequence of non-negative integers of arbitrary size in the form of a sequence without delimiters, of "digits" from a collection of 36: a–z and 0–9, representing 0–25 and 26–35 respectively. A digit lower than a threshold value marks that it is the most-significant digit, hence the end of the number. The threshold value depends on the position in the number. For example, if the threshold value for the first digit is b (i.e. 1) then a (i.e. 0) marks the end of the number (it has just one digit), so in numbers of more than one digit the range is only b–9 (1–35), therefore the weight b1 is 35 instead of 36. Suppose the threshold values for the second and third digits are c (2), then the third digit has a weight 34 × 35 = 1190 and we have the following sequence:

a (0), ba (1), ca (2), .., 9a (35), bb (36), cb (37), .., 9b (70), bca (71), .., 99a (1260), bcb (1261), etc.

Unlike a regular based numeral system, there are numbers like 9b where 9 and b each represents 35; yet the representation is unique because ac and aca are not allowed – the a would terminate the number.

The flexibility in choosing threshold values allows optimization depending on the frequency of occurrence of numbers of various sizes.

The case with all threshold values equal to 1 corresponds to bijective numeration, where the zeros correspond to separators of numbers with digits which are non-zero.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ David Eugene Smith; Louis Charles Karpinski (1911). The Hindu-Arabic numerals. Ginn and Company. 


  • Georges Ifrah. The Universal History of Numbers : From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, Wiley, 1999. ISBN 0-471-37568-3.
  • D. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2, 3rd Ed. Addison–Wesley. pp. 194–213, "Positional Number Systems".
  • A.L. Kroeber (Alfred Louis Kroeber) (1876–1960), Handbook of the Indians of California, Bulletin 78 of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution (1919)
  • J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London and Chicago, 1997.
  • Hans J. Nissen; Peter Damerow; Robert K. Englund (1993). Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-58659-5. 
  • Schmandt-Besserat, Denise (1996). How Writing Came About. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-77704-0. 
  • Zaslavsky, Claudia (1999). Africa counts: number and pattern in African cultures. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 978-1-55652-350-2. 

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