BRIEF ARTICLE
THE AUTHOR
“Equivalence” (mod
n
) is of course not the same thing as “equality”: 13
= 7 for example,but 13
≡
3
7. Equivalence
does
share some properties with equality, and herein lies muchof its usefulness.We will refer to the following remarkable facts as
The Fundamental Theorem of Modular Arithmetic
:
Addition and multiplication both “work” using modular equivalences.
This is obviously somewhat informal; what does “work” mean here? One way to state thismore formally is that if
a
≡
n
x
and
b
≡
n
y
it follows that
a
+
b
≡
n
x
+
y
and
ab
≡
n
xy .
Don’t worry if you’re confused by this formal statement; it should become clearer afterwe’ve worked through some examples.0.1.
Example: mod 10.
Let’s consider the example of mod 10. First of all, it’s easy tosee that every natural number is equivalent mod 10 to exactly one number from the set
Z
10
=
{
0
,
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
,
5
,
6
,
7
,
8
,
9
}
.
These are all the possible
remainders
when we divide a natural number by ten. (The symbol
Z
10
is standard for this set; the “
Z
” comes from
zahlen
, which is German for “numbers”.The official name of this set is
the integers modulo ten
; it’s usually called simply “zeemod ten” or “zee ten”. ) Note that
Z
10
consists of the
ten
natural numbers
less than
10.In fact it’s even easy to determine
which
number in
Z
10
a given number is equivalent to:31
,
415
,
265
,
358
,
979
≡
10
9
,
for example, and you don’t need a calculator to see this. Just think about what happenswhen you divide by ten. The remainder is always the last digit.Another way to state the fundamental theorem for mod 10 numbers is that for any twonatural numbers,
(i.)
the last digit of the sum is equivalent mod ten to the sum of the lastdigits, and
(ii.)
the last digit of the product is equivalent mod ten to the product of thelast digits.But this is well-known! In fact, the familiar algorithms for calculating sums and productsillustrate this principle quite nicely. Consider the example of the two numbers
a
= 314and
b
= 159. The fundamental theorem (part
(i.)
asserts that the last digit of the sumdepends only on the last digits of
a
and
b
. 314+ 1594734+ 913The last digit is “3” in each case; in fact we
know
these last digits must match by the verynature of the procedure for calculating the sum!By the same token, we have 314
×
159 = 49926, whereas 4
×
9 = 36. Again, the lastdigits match; again, the familiar multiplication algortithm shows why this
must
be so.In terms of equivalences, we are asserting that because314
≡
10
4 and 159
≡
10
9
,
we must have314 + 159
≡
10
4 + 9 and314
×
159
≡
10
4
×
9
,
which is a special case of the “fundamental theorem”.We can think of mod ten arithmetic as “the arithmetic of last digits”. The numbers in
1
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