Part of a series on |
Numeral systems |
---|
List of numeral systems |
![]() | This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.(January 2023) |
The quater-imaginary numeral system is a numeral system, first proposed by Donald Knuth in 1960. Unlike standard numeral systems, which use an integer (such as 10 in decimal, or 2 in binary) as their bases, it uses the imaginary number 2i (equivalent to ) as its base. It is able to (almost) uniquely represent every complex number using only the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3.[1] Numbers less than zero, which are ordinarily represented with a minus sign, are representable as digit strings in quater-imaginary; for example, the number −1 is represented as "103" in quater-imaginary notation.