Calculating the Date of Easter

The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."

Comments

Metric School Terms

[26199]

In the UK the academic year is split according to the date of Easter. I recall hearing about an effort to move to a "metric" system which doesn't depend on Easter. This suddenly makes a lot of sense...

Re:Metric School Terms

[Foobar of Borg]

Yeah, those of us above school age also get a statutory 28 days paid holiday. Which seems a lot compared to the US 11 or 12(?)

I think 11 or 12 days is about what Americans in the professional class wind up getting on average, but *statutorily* we get somewhere between jack and shit.

To take it to the extreme the French are forced to work at most on 35 hours and get four weeks but have to take them in August.

So basically, if you want to invade France make sure to do it in August. That way, they won't notice until they come back from vacation :-).

Re:how is it...

[Otter]

Calculating the Date of Easter Finds Possible Cure For Cancer

There, now it's an official Science article.

Re:how is it...

[CRCulver]

Arguably it is a math article to the interested christians on /.

Methinks many families that profess no especial religion nonetheless buy their children bunny figures, chocolate, and disgusting gelatin chicks in the springtime. These sort of articles, besides showing Christians when their religious day falls, also explain when to expect such mechandise in your local stores.

Re:Why would

[CSMatt]

In his defense, the picture tagged with the story is pi.

Only this year.

[raehl]

Ah! The March of progress.

Next year it will be April again though.

Re:Why would

[flyingfsck]

I don't care about the myths - the chocolate bunnies and eggs are good enough for me.

Save the earth! It is the *only* planet with chocolate!

Stupid *nix Tricks

[Relic of the Future]

cal 9 1752

Calendars are funny things.