Hexagram 49's political charge makes it a convenient place to address a claim about the book's structure that is frequently overstated.
The King Wen sequence is the received order of the sixty-four hexagrams, and it is not arithmetical. It is built largely out of pairs, a figure followed by its inversion, or where inverting produces the same figure, by its complement, and it is the order in which the text has been transmitted for two millennia. Why the pairs fall where they do is not fully explained by anything in the text.
A second arrangement, the Fu Xi or before-heaven order, is arithmetical. Attributed to the legendary Fu Xi but actually devised by the eleventh-century scholar Shao Yong, it arranges the hexagrams so that reading broken and unbroken lines as digits produces a straight binary count. Shao Yong did not use it to calculate; the arrangement was cosmological.
In 1703 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had developed binary arithmetic independently and was in correspondence with the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet in Beijing, published the first European commentary connecting the two. The correspondence is real, the mathematical fact is real, and Leibniz took it as evidence that an ancient wisdom had anticipated his notation.
What is not true is that the I Ching is a binary system, or that the King Wen sequence encodes one. The binary reading applies to a specific eleventh-century rearrangement, not to the transmitted book. The Mawangdui manuscript, recovered in 1973, gives a third order again, grouped by upper trigram, and whether it is older than King Wen's is disputed.