Congruences for L-Functions

In [Hardy and Williams, 1986] the authors exploited a very simple idea to obtain a linear congruence involving class numbers of imaginary quadratic fields modulo a certain power of 2. Their congruence provided a unified setting for many congruences proved previously by other authors using various means. The Hardy-Williams idea was as follows. Let d be the discriminant of a quadratic field. Suppose that d is odd and let d = PIP2· . . Pn be its unique decomposition into prime discriminants. Then,