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In Surprising Generalizations, it is mentioned that Chinese remainder theorem and Lagrange interpolation are specific instances of the same thing, my question is what is their common generalisation/abstraction ?

Thank you

PS : Should there be a Generalisation tag ? to be used when one knows a specific concept and is looking for it's generalisation/more-abstract forms?

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    Yeah, it is well-hidden :) It took me a moment to fi$g$ure that out.2011-07-28

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The connection between the two is explained in an old blog post of mine. The Wikipedia article has more details.

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i would say, Lagrange interpolation is the extension of the CRT for polynomials. This paper gives some examples and tries to answer the question about the connection. I think it's quite understandable.

Greetings

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    @Theo I once had a copy of Oberst's article. It's a very nice survey iirc. If anyone finds a copy I'd be indebted if they could forward it to my first.last at gmail.com. I'm sure this idea appears in print earlier than 1950, but searching the usual places hasn't turned up anything yet. It's mentioned in symbolic computation papers starting around 1970, since modular reduction techniques play a fundamental rule for computation. So I agree with Askey, though I would say more specifically that it's well known to those working in symbolic computation - not in general computer science.2011-07-29