The Pythagorean Comma

Sandra Singh is a doctoral candidate modular arithmetic at Washington State University. She developed computer architectures to solve various systems of congruences. "I'm still not sure why your listeners would be interested in this," she says, trying to identify the number of her producer sent you. But there's another guy named Ruben Neil who did some pretty unique stuff with it using computational models. He figured out some impressive modular problems using something called a Pythagorean comma.