When you look at your watch late at night, is it 20:10 or 10 past 10 in the evening? If you have a four-hour flight from Zurich to Oslo at 21:00, do you arrive at 01:00 in the morning or at 25:00? The answer to these questions seems clear: we reset our hour counter to zero every 12 or 24 hours and start counting all over again. But why is that actually the case? Why did we choose a 12- or 24-hour rhythm? What would change if we started counting again every 23 hours instead? You can explore these questions and dive into the exciting world of modular arithmetic. The numbers are playfully divided into different groups in order to get to know their properties better in the context of this mathematical description. In the process, you will come across a special kind of number that doesn’t seem to fit into this grid at all: Mathematicians have been dealing with these mysterious numbers for thousands of years! Following in the footsteps of ancient mathematicians like Euclid, you will learn to see numbers from a (completely) new perspective and explore this fascinating world with a good mix of playful discovery, mathematical language and a pinch of infinity.

When you look at your watch late at night, is it 20:10 or 10 past 10 in the evening? If you have a four-hour flight from Zurich to Oslo at 21:00, do you arrive at 01:00 in the morning or at 25:00? The answer to these questions seems clear: we reset our hour counter to zero every 12 or 24 hours and start counting all over again. But why is that actually the case? Why did we choose a 12- or 24-hour rhythm? What would change if we started counting again every 23 hours instead? You can explore these questions and dive into the exciting world of modular arithmetic. The numbers are playfully divided into different groups in order to get to know their properties better in the context of this mathematical description. In the process, you will come across a special kind of number that doesn’t seem to fit into this grid at all: Mathematicians have been dealing with these mysterious numbers for thousands of years! Following in the footsteps of ancient mathematicians like Euclid, you will learn to see numbers from a (completely) new perspective and explore this fascinating world with a good mix of playful discovery, mathematical language and a pinch of infinity.