The Secret Math of Hot Dogs and Buns

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An amusing dive into the perennial problem of ill-matching hotdog and bun quantities, visualising the math behind the Chinese remainder theorem in a practical light. Aside from using this theorem (detailed in the article) to figure out how many packs of buns and dogs you should buy for your next barbecue (relatively primitive mathematics), the same theorem is applied to a cryptographic setting: “you can use the theorem to keep a number secret until a group of people agree to collaborate to identify it.” Read full article here

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