Monday, October 18, 2010

Section 3.10 Due 18 Oct 2010

1. The last example given in the assigned section was the hardest part for me to understand. This is primarily because of property (2) on page 91. I don't understand how n can be congruent to 3 or 5 or 1 or 7 (mod n). It seems to me that n would always be congruent to 0. I imagine that there is some typo in the book, but I don't know what it would be or how to fix it.
2. Also, it is interesting/difficult to understand how you can mathematically equate a number like (2/3211) to +,-1. At first I thought that they were just symbols used to replace one another, but then they started being used in mathematical calculations. I'm just not quite sure I understand how 2/3211 can legitimately be said to equal plus or minus 1.

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