Historical Notes
The fact that every non-negative integer has a unique representation in bijective base-k (k ≥ 1), is a "folk theorem" that has been rediscovered many times. Early instances are Smullyan (1961) for the case k = 2, and Böhm (1964) for all k ≥ 1 (the latter using these representations to perform computations in the programming language P′′). Knuth (1969) mentions the special case of k = 10, and Salomaa (1973) discusses the cases k ≥ 2. Forslund (1995) considers that if ancient numeration systems used bijective base-k, they might not be recognised as such in archaeological documents, due to general unfamiliarity with this system. (The latter article is notable in that it does not cite existing literature on this system, but appears to unwittingly reinvent it.)
Read more about this topic: Bijective Numeration
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