Power of two

Because two is the base of the binary system, powers of two are important to computer science. Specifically, two to the power of n is the number of ways the bits in a binary integer of length n can be arranged, and thus numbers that are one less than a power of two denote the upper bounds of integers in binary computers (one less because 0, not 1, is used as the lower bound). As a consequence, numbers of this form show up frequently in computer software. As one example, in the video game The Legend of Zelda for the 8-bit Nintendo, one can only hold 255 rupeess at one time - the result of a byte, which is 8 bits long, being used to store the number, giving a maximum value of 2⁸-1 = 255.

Powers of two also measure computer memory. A byte is eight (2³) bits, and a kilobyte (some prefer the word kibibyte) is 1 024 (2¹⁰) bytes. Nearly all processor registers have sizes that are powers of two (32 being currently used in most personal computers).

Powers of two occur in a range of other places as well. For many disk drives, at least one of the sector size, number of sectors per track, and number of tracks per surface is a power of two. The logical block size is almost always a power of two.

Numbers which are not powers of two occur in a number of situations such as video resolutions, but they are often the sum or product of only two or three powers of two, or powers of two minus one. For example, 640 = 512 + 128, and 480 = 32 × 15. Put another way, they have fairly regular bit patterns.

A prime number that is one less than a power of two is called a Mersenne prime. For example, the prime number 31 is a Mersenne prime because it is 1 less than 32 (2⁵).

The first forty powers of two

Powers of two whose exponents are powers of two

Because modern memory cells and registers often hold a number of bits which is a power of two, the most frequent

powers of two to appear are those whose exponent is also a power of two.  –   A short list of some of these follows :

2	=	21
4	=	22
16	=	24
256	=	28
65 536	=	216
4 294 967 296	=	232
18 446 744 073 709 551 616	=	264
340 282 366 920 938 463 463 374 607 431 768 211 456	=	2128
115 792 089 237 316 195 423 570 985 008 687 907 853 269 984 665 640 564 039 457 584 007 913 129 639 936	=	2256

Several of these numbers represent the number of values representable using common computer data types. For example, a 32-bit word consisting of 4 bytes can represent 2³² distinct values, which can either be regarded as mere bit-patterns, or are more commonly interpreted as the unsigned numbers from 0 to 2³²-1, or as the range of signed numbers between -2³¹ and 2³¹-1.

Other recognizable powers of two