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 ...

Discrete mathematics gets easier when you know how to approach proofs. Direct reasoning, induction, and contradiction each have specific steps that can be learned and practiced. Pairing these methods ...

Hidden inside a simple color-mixing analogy is one of the most elegant ideas in cryptography, a mathematical trap door that ...