Short division

It is an abbreviated form of long division — whereby the products are omitted and the partial remainders are notated as superscripts.

The answer to the problem would be the quotient, and in the case of Euclidean division, the remainder would be included as well.

This is in distinction to long division, where the space under the dividend is required for workings: The procedure involves several steps.

The dividend is successively divided by prime numbers, repeating where possible: This results in 950 = 2 x 5² x 19 When one is interested only in the remainder of the division, this procedure (a variation of short division) ignores the quotient and tallies only the remainders.

Given a divisor k, this procedure can be written as a deterministic finite automaton with k states, each corresponding to a possible remainder.