You may never have heard of modular arithmetic, but you use it every day without the slightest difficulty. In this system, numbers wrap around when they reach a certain size called the modulus; it is ...

I'm sure FPGA logic designers have often heard it said: “We just need to take this number mod 3.” Or maybe something like, “Just round to the nearest hundred.” This latter case really means: “Take the ...

One of my fellow contributors here recently wrote a post about leap years and why we have them. This reminded me of modular arithmetic and the formula for calculating the day of the week for any date ...

The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They’re at the heart of modern number theory. The rational numbers are the most familiar numbers: 1, -5, ½, and every ...