Humans use the decimal digits zero to nine because they have ten fingers.

Penguins are limited to using binary zeros and ones because they have only two flippers.

Well Martians have 16 fingers, so they have sixteen digits,which they call kpxvz to zxkyt, where kpxvz is the same as our zero. Their maths system is called hexadecimal, (hex for short).

When we translate Martian to Human we can use 0 to 9 for the first ten Martian fingers because they they are the same.

Humans haven't any words for the Martian numbers for the remaining six fingers, oggfv to zxkyt.

The best we can do is to use the letters A B C D E F where A is equivalent to oggfv and F represents zxkyt.

So translating Martian (hexadecimal) we use the following (binary equivalents are included).

So 000F hex is the same as decimal 15.
     0010 hex is the same as decimal 16
     0100 hex is the same as decimal 256
     1000 hex is the same as decimal 4096

1111 hex = 4096+256+16+1=?
00FF=255
FFFF=65535

Prove it.

Imagine typing in hundreds of these numbers without making a mistake.
     1111011111001101

We can make life somewhat easier by breaking this into four sections.
      1111    0111    1100   1101

and converting into the hex equivalent.
         F        7            C        D

or  F7CD.  Easier to type!