Set up a number of categories to display on a page

I am basically looking for a way to display only 3 categories on my template page. I used a foreach loop to display all the categories on my pages

$categories = get_categories();
foreach($categories as $category) {
   echo '<div class="col-md-4"><a href="' . 
    get_category_link($category->term_id) . '">' . $category->name 
  . '</a></div>';
}?>

this code displays all the categories on my page but I just want to display 3 per page and eventually add paginations

Answer

as per my comments above. the code example I can give you is as follows

for($i = 0; $i <= count($categories); $i++) {
    /* 
    Pagination purposes this is how you can format data to an object 
    base.
    */
    if($i % 3 = 0) {
       // add to an array
    }
}

for ($i = 0; $i <= 3; $i++) {
// echo categories HTML but $categories[$i] instead
}

though let it be known that this wont fully work as you would think etc… etc… I cant explain the modulus operator in depth as I cant think of an easy way without you trying to learn it so you can understand it well.

this way you are only getting 3