The 2009’s Doomsday is Saturday
John H. Conway is teaching me his doomsday algorithm to calculate the day of the week for any day. The first lesson was devoted to 2009. “The 2009’s Doomsday is Saturday” is a magic phrase I need to remember.
The doomsday of a particular year is the day of the week on which the last day of February falls. February 28 of 2009 is Saturday, thus 2009’s doomsday is Saturday. For leap years it is the day of the week of February 29. We can combine the rules for leap years and non-leap years into one common rule: that the doomsday of a particular year is the day of the week of March 0.
If you know the day of the week of one of the days in 2009, you can theoretically calculate the day of the week of any other day that year. To save yourself time, you can learn by heart all the days of the year that fall on doomsday. That is actually what Conway does, and that is why he is so fast with calculations. The beauty of the algorithm is that the days of the doomsday are almost the same each year. They are the same for all months other than January and February; and in January and February you need to make a small adjustment for a leap year. That gives me hope that after I learn how to calculate days in 2009 I can easily move to any year.
To get us going we do not need to remember all the doomsday days in 2009. It is enough to remember one day for each month. We already know one for February, which works for March too. As there are 28 days in February, January 31 happens on a doomsday. Or January 32 for leap years.
Now we need to choose days for other months that are on doomsday and at the same time are easy to remember. Here is a nice set: 4/4, 6/6, 8/8. 10/10. For even months the days that are the same as the month will work. The reason it works so nicely is that two consecutive months starting with an even-numbered month, excluding February and December, have the sum of days equaling 61. Hence, those two months plus two days are 63, which is divisible by 7.
Remembering one of the doomsdays for every other month might be enough to significantly simplify calculations. But if you want a day for every month, there are additional doomsday days to remember on odd numbered months: 5/9, 9/5, 7/11 and 11/7. These days can be memorized as a mnemonic “9-5 job at 7-11,” or, if you prefer, “I do not want to have a 9-5 job at 7-11.”
If you throw in March 7, then the rule will fit into a poem John recited to me:
The last of Feb., or of Jan. will do
(Except that in leap years it’s Jan. 32).
Then for even months use the month’s own day,
And for odd ones add 4, or take it away*.
*According to length or simply remember,
you only subtract for September or November.
Let’s see how I calculate the day of the week for my friend’s birthday, July 29. The 11th of July falls on the doomsday, hence July 25 must be a doomsday. So we can see that my friend will celebrate on Wednesday this year.
You might ask why I described this trivial example in such detail. The reason is that you might be tempted to subtract 11 from 29, getting 18 and saying that you need to add four days to Saturday. In the method I described the calculation is equivalent, but as a bonus you calculate another day for the doomsday and consequently, you are getting closer to John Conway who remembers all doomsdays.
My homework is the same as your homework: practice calculating the days of the week for 2009.
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Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog » Blog Archive » The Second Doomsday Lesson:
[…] at Tiger Noodles. He gave me the second Doomsday lesson right there on a napkin. I described the first Doomsday lesson earlier, in which John taught me to calculate the days of the week for 2009. Now was the time to […]
30 April 2010, 8:40 am