Abstract
Suppose a certain airline is consistently 25 hours late in departure and arrival (this has happened, but no names will be mentioned) while another one, flying the same route, is only 2 to 3 hours late. If you were in a hurry, which airline would you fly — food, lack of leg room and all else being equal? Obviously, being 25 hours late is as good (or bad) as being only 1 hour late. In other words, in a daily recurring event an extra day, or even several, makes no difference. The mathematics that deals with this kind of situation is called modular arithmetic, because only remainders modulo a given integer matter.
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References
G. H. Hardy, E. M. Wright: An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, 5th ed., Sect. 5. 2 ( Clarendon, Oxford 1984 )
P. J. Davis: The Lore of Large Numbers ( Random House, New York 1961 )
L. E. Dickson: History of the Theory of Numbers, 1–3 Vols. (Chelsea, New York 1952 )
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Schroeder, M.R. (1986). Linear Congruences. In: Number Theory in Science and Communication. Springer Series in Information Sciences, vol 7. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-22246-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-22246-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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