This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Smith chapter.
A fun fact from Perry, the wannabe mathematician:
This is a fun fact taken from the concept behind Fermat’s Little Theorem (for all of you math nerds, this is one of my favorite theorems). If you take any whole number a, and raise it to a power that is both prime and greater than a (we’ll call this (a^p)), then a is the remainder when you divide a by your chosen exponent. So (a^p) /p = some number with a remainder a.
Let’s try it!
Say a = 4 and p = 5.
4^5 = 1024 and 1024/5 = 1020 with a remainder of 4!