Number reference
512 explained.
512: five hundred twelve, composite, power of two; factors, prime factorization, roots, binary, hexadecimal, and digit properties.
Identity and representations
- Written form
- five hundred twelve
- Classification
- composite
- Factors
- 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512
- Prime factorization
- 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2
- Square root
- 22.627417
- Cube root
- 8
- Binary
- 1000000000
- Octal
- 1000
- Hexadecimal
- 200
- Roman numeral
- DXII
- Digit sum
- 8
- Digital root
- 8
What makes 512 notable
- Power of two. 512 = 2^9, which is why it shows up in memory sizes, image dimensions, and anything that repeatedly halves or doubles.
- Perfect cube. 512 = 8³, so a cube of edge 8 has a volume of 512.
512 in everyday use
Five hundred twelve is two to the ninth power and eight cubed, so it appears throughout computing: disk drives used 512-byte sectors for decades, memory came in 512 MB modules, and 512 is a common texture size in graphics because it is a power of two. Sound engineers meet it as a buffer size in samples. Being 8³, it is also the number of small cubes in an eight-by-eight-by-eight block and the number of possible three-digit octal values.
The number has a curious self-referential property: its digits add to 5 + 1 + 2 = 8, and 8³ = 512. Numbers whose digit sum cubed gives them back are called Dudeney numbers, and there are only six: 1, 512, 4,913, 5,832, 17,576, and 19,683. It has ten divisors, all powers of two, is 1000000000 in binary, and is 200 in hexadecimal. It is the ninth power of two, so nine doublings from one reach it.
Nearby numbers
How to read this page
The factor list shows every way 512 splits into equal whole-number groups — 10 divisors in total. The prime factorisation is the compact form of that same information, and the base conversions restate 512 for contexts that do not use decimal.
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