Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stanley, P.

Titel

On the frequency of Friday the thirteenth

Ist Teil von

• Mathematical gazette, 2021-07, Vol.105 (563), p.222-225

Ort / Verlag

Leicester: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This article begins with a new look at earlier work on this topic and continues with the presentation of a graphical technique for the determination of the months of a year for which the 13th is a Friday. It might be thought that the likelihood of the 13 th day of a month being a Friday is the same as that of the 13th being any other day, but this is not so. The full day/date repeat cycle is 400 years, this being the interval between century years which are leap years. The outcome of an extraordinary counting exercise some 50 years ago by a 13-year-old Eton schoolboy, S. R. Baxter [1, 2], was to show that, over this period, the 13th of a month will be a Friday at least once more than any other day. Of necessity, Baxter’s calculation was intricate and an independent confirmation was undertaken as a matter of interest. The 400-year period beginning 1 March 2014 was considered. The work is described in four stages.