Binary number
India

The Indian scholar Pingala (c. 2nd century BC) developed a binary system for describing prosody. He described meters in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables). They were known as laghu (light) and guru (heavy) syllables.

Pingala's Hindu classic titled Chandaḥśāstra (8.23) describes the formation of a matrix in order to give a unique value to each meter. "Chandaḥśāstra" literally translates to science of meters in Sanskrit. The binary representations in Pingala's system increases towards the right, and not to the left like in the binary numbers of the modern positional notation. In Pingala's system, the numbers start from number one, and not zero. Four short syllables "0000" is the first pattern and corresponds to the value one. The numerical value is obtained by adding one to the sum of place values.
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