Skip to content

Chinese Remainder / Linear Congruences Ladder

Who This Is For

Use this ladder when you are comfortable with modular arithmetic basics, but statements that combine several residue conditions still feel slippery.

Warm-Up

  • gcd and lcm
  • extended Euclid / Bézout coefficients
  • modular normalization into [0, m)

Core

  • merge two congruences into one equivalent congruence
  • detect impossible systems with the gcd-consistency check
  • solve one linear congruence by reducing to extended Euclid, even if the exact starter here focuses on system merges

Stretch

  • explain why coprime CRT is only the clean theorem case, not the whole contest lane
  • compare one composite-mod inverse with a full congruence-system merge
  • compare pairwise merge against richer reconstruction techniques like Garner

Retrieval Layer

Repo Anchors

Exit Criteria

You are ready to move on when you can:

  • merge two congruences without guessing the algebra
  • explain exactly when a non-coprime system is inconsistent
  • reduce a x ≡ b (mod m) to the same extended-Euclid worldview
  • decide when the task is only one inverse and does not need a full CRT merge

External Practice