How a reclusive Chinese philosopher helped lay the foundations for modern binary computing

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Shao Yong, an 11th-century scholar who shunned government office for a life of mystical speculation, developed a unique mathematical system based on the I Ching. His binary ordering of hexagrams eventually reached the 18th-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, providing a conceptual bridge to the language of modern computers.

Born in 1011, Shao Yong was a central figure in the intellectual landscape of the Song dynasty. While his contemporaries often pursued official government roles, Shao lived as a recluse near Luoyang, dedicating his time to poetry, the game of Go, and deep philosophical inquiry. He was a pioneer of the 'image-number' approach to the I Ching, a method that prioritized cosmological and iconographic structures over the literalistic interpretations favored by other scholars of his era.

Shao’s worldview was defined by the belief that numerical patterns were the fundamental building blocks of existence. Unlike traditional numerologists who emphasized the numbers two or five, Shao centered his philosophy on the number four. He argued that the universe, the human body, and all physical substances were divided into four distinct manifestations. This belief in an underlying unity that could be grasped through mathematical principles became a cornerstone of the idealist school of Neo-Confucianism.

Beyond his numerology, Shao introduced the Buddhist concept of cyclical history into Confucian thought. He proposed that time moves in repeating cycles known as yuan, each lasting 129,600 years. This theory was later adopted as official state ideology by the influential scholar Zhu Xi. By synthesizing diverse traditions—Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—Shao created a complex cosmological framework that sought to unify the human mind with the structure of the universe itself.

His legacy persists not only in Chinese philosophy but also in the history of mathematics. By arranging the I Ching hexagrams into a binary sequence, Shao anticipated the logic of modern digital systems. When this work was studied by Leibniz centuries later, it helped inform the development of binary arithmetic, proving that the abstract speculations of a solitary hermit could echo across centuries and cultures to shape the technological foundations of the modern world.

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