Math cheatsheet before you deep-dive into ZK

We're not going to explain ZK in five minutes here. We're not even going to touch it. But there are a handful of math topics you have to understand before anything in this series makes sense. Are you scared of those nasty math symbols? Does opening an arxiv paper make you want to hide under your bed? Good. Same here. So let's get comfortable with it slowly, one concept at a time, with zero greek letters and some things you can click on. 1. Modular arithmetic Think of a clock. A normal clock has 12 positions (0 through 11 if you're a programmer). If it's 10 o'clock and you add 5 hours, you don't get 15. You get 3. The number wraps around. That's modular arithmetic. The mod operator gives you the remainder after division: 10 + 5 = 15 → 15 mod 12 = 3 7 + 7 = 14 → 14 mod 12 = 2 In crypto, the modulus isn't 12. It's a prime number so large it has 77 digits. But the principle is identical: every result wraps back into a fixed range, and that wrapping destroys information about the original i