In 1697, a French Jesuit missionary in China, Joachim Bouvet, introduced the I Ching to German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, who was amazed by the Book of Changes and its use of binary arithmetic, then unknown in Europe. Leibnitz spread the good word, and thus our civilization was first introduced to binary arithmetic, which is not only the cornerstone of the Book of Changes but also the language of all modern computers. Leibnitz was not the only great mind fascinated with the I Ching. Foremost among those who extolled its merit was no doubt psychologist Carl C. Jung, who saw in the Book of Changes the most perfect illustration of his own Theory of Archetypes and referred to the I Ching as "the most profound book ever to come from the East."

Books that relate the history of computers generally credit the digital theory that is the foundation of computer systems to Gottfried Leibniz, who is many times referred to as "the father of the digital revolution". The picture on the left is an illustration of the binary system that Leibniz created, and the picture below is an illustration of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. There is not much difference between the two illustrations as the picture on the left merely uses the numbers 0 and 1 rather than the symbols of Yin and Yang.

"In his article Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire (1703) Gottfried Leibniz writes that he has found in the hexagrams a base for claiming the universality of the binary numeral system. He takes the layout of the combinatorial excercise found in the hexagrams to represent binary sequences, so that |||||| would correspond to the binary sequence 000000 and |||||: would be 000001, and so forth."