Re: [Phys-L] Sylvester's stamp puzzle

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

Since people seem to be having fun with this, I wrote up a spreadsheet
that lays bare the central idea of the proof, namely congruence classes.
   https://www.av8n.com/math/sylvester-stamp-congruence.xls

There are probably eleventeen ways of doing the proof, but this is the
simplest way that occurred to me.

Feel free to fiddle with the denominations in the yellow-shaded cells.
The rest should take care of itself automagically.

It's amusing how something as lowbrow and concrete as a spreadsheet
can advance the understanding of things as fancy and abstract as
Diophantine analysis and number theory.