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Who Discovered the Binary System and Arithmetic? Did Leibniz Plagiarize Caramuel?

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What a peculiar thing the binary system is:

It is capable of extraordinary things.

Note, first,

That two is one and zero

And five, on the other hand, one hundred and one

(Anon)

Abstract

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is the self-proclaimed inventor of the binary system and is considered as such by most historians of mathematics and/or mathematicians. Really though, we owe the groundwork of today’s computing not to Leibniz but to the Englishman Thomas Harriot and the Spaniard Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606–1682), whom Leibniz plagiarized. This plagiarism has been identified on the basis of several facts: Caramuel’s work on the binary system is earlier than Leibniz’s, Leibniz was acquainted—both directly and indirectly—with Caramuel’s work and Leibniz had a natural tendency to plagiarize scientific works.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank AEAT (Spanish Tax Agency), for its financial support, and Rachel Elliott (CETTICO: Centre of Computing and Communications Technology Transfer), for her help in translating this paper. Our thanks also go to Salomé García, for acting as intermediary among the three universities.

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Correspondence to M. A. Martínez.

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Ares, J., Lara, J., Lizcano, D. et al. Who Discovered the Binary System and Arithmetic? Did Leibniz Plagiarize Caramuel?. Sci Eng Ethics 24, 173–188 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9890-6

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