![]() There's an Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies for people born on February 29. Regardless, the custom has a long history in places such as Ireland, where leap day is also called Bachelor’s Day. Saint Patrick was rumored to be an early proponent, and there’s a contentious claim that in 1288 Queen Margaret of Scotland-who was only five at the time-legalized a fine for men who turned down a woman’s leap day marriage proposal. How this whole trend got started is pretty murky. Not specified, Wikimedia Commons//public domain There’s a centuries-old tradition of women proposing to men on leap days. That’s why 2000 CE was considered a leap year, but the year 2100 CE won’t be. However, if a given century year is divisible by four, it still gets a leap day, and is thus a bona fide leap year. "Century years” like 1700, 1800, and 1900 did not receive leap days, lasting for just the standard 365 days. Under Gregorian calendar rules, certain leap years get skipped. It was first implemented in 1582, and we’re still using it today. ![]() Thus, the new and improved Gregorian calendar was born. ![]() A commission was established to modify the old calendar and upgrade the leap year system. This prompted Pope Gregory XIII to take action. By 1577, the Julian calendar had fallen 10 days out of alignment, meaning important Christian holidays weren't being celebrated on the proper dates. Over time, the discrepancy spelled trouble. Yet this isn’t quite right as we now know, they last for approximately 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds (ie: 365.24219 days) apiece. Like many of his contemporaries, Sosigenes believed that each solar year (the amount of time between successive vernal equinoxes) lasted for 365.25 days. The Julian Calendar didn’t exactly fix the leap year problem. Unfortunately, the whole system fell prey to a miscalculation and ended up including too many leap years. This was meant to keep the new calendar in alignment with the Earth’s position relative to the Sun. One of his major changes was the implementation of leap years: Every fourth year, February would receive an extra day. So at Caesar’s request, Sosigenes reformed it. By this point in history, the traditional Roman calendar had fallen out of sync with the seasons. To figure out if a year (say, 1999) is a leap year, you need to test whether it is divisible evenly - that is, if there is no remainder after the division - by three different values.Established in the year 46 BCE, the so-named Julian calendar was devised by Julius Caesar and the Greek astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria. The fact that it is approximately 365.25 days should mean that leap year should come every fourth year.īut, things are a bit more complicated than that because one revolution around the sun is almost but not quite 365.25 years, so leap years come slightly less often than once every four years. Leap years let the calendar adjust for the fact that it takes the earth takes slightly over 365 days to revolve around the sun. Some years in our (Gregorian) calendar are "leap years." In a leap year, February has a 29th day and the year overall has 366. In a CS10 class, students might be comfortable with the subjectivity of this question based on their classroom culture, but I would think most high school math or computer sceince students are going to be expecting questions to have a "right answer" and if we want to ask questions like this, we might need to be careful to help teachers build a culture that is more comfortable with questions like this. ![]() MF: The last question here ("Which script is the most beatuiful?") is a tricky one.And there are a lot of different constraints with this leap year issue. Divisibility might not be a comfortable topic for our NYC students. MF: Again, I'm wanting us to be mindful of mathematical level here.
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