Crazy math fact you must know
The article’s title may appear to contradict you, but everything appears to be reasonable in the end. Let’s look at an army soldier. It is standard protocol in the army to use a 24-hour time format. His watch showed 2100 hours (9 PM). When an officer asked him, “what time would it be after 6 hours?” he responded, “Sir, 0300 hours, sir.” The answer looks quite good, but is it correct?
It should be 2700 hours according to standard adding principles. The reason for this is that after 2400 hours, we begin over from zero. Modular arithmetic is the name given to this form of mathematics. In the army, the time format is mod 24.
In this field of arithmetic, addition and multiplication are performed as normal, but in the end, we only consider the remainder of the result after division by a certain number. That number is known as modulus. The modulus in the previous case was 24.
Moving on to the central idea, if we construct a chart for the addition of two integers with a modulus 3, it will look like this,
Here we can see that 2+2=1. QED.
Because we haven’t defined addition, 2+2 may be equivalent to 5. That’s where the joke comes of not letting mathematicians handle the restaurant bills because they haven’t yet agreed on how to define addition.
For more explanation click here.
Learn more about Dynamic Programming, Branchless Programming and Sorting Algorithms.
