WORLD OF FIGURES: Five Mondays in February is not a rare occurrence

A friend forwarded to me a message proclaiming that this February is unique in that it has four Sundays, four Mondays, four Tuesdays, etc. Apparently, this special phenomenon occurs only once every 823 years. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • If you forward a message to five people then the five send to another five each, the message will be in the hands of over 12,000,000 people by the end of the tenth level in the series.

  • Now, if you think about it; only a month with 28 days should have exactly four Sundays, four Mondays, four Tuesdays, etc.

  • The reason is simple: a week has seven days and 7 x 4 = 28. So, in reality, the so-called unique phenomenon is more common than not.

A friend forwarded to me a message proclaiming that this February is unique in that it has four Sundays, four Mondays, four Tuesdays, etc. Apparently, this special phenomenon occurs only once every 823 years.

But before I could reply, he sent a follow-up message in which he said that he had checked his calendar and found that this month actually has five Mondays! So, he correctly concluded that the original message was a hoax.

This incident demonstrates why we should check whether the strange things we read online are true. In this particular instance, many people have fallen for the lie and gone ahead to “forward if to five people or five groups … within 11 minutes” as instructed.

They hope to get many bags of money after doing that: what a shame!

The incident also demonstrates the magnitude of junk doing the rounds in modern communication networks. Back in the day, when Microsoft was the only email server in the world, they did a survey and found that over 80 per cent of messages processed

were useless chain-letters. I doubt if that ratio has changed to date.

If you forward a message to five people then the five send to another five each, the message will be in the hands of over 12,000,000 people by the end of the tenth level in the series.

Now, if you think about it; only a month with 28 days should have exactly four Sundays, four Mondays, four Tuesdays, etc.

The reason is simple: a week has seven days and 7 x 4 = 28. So, in reality, the so-called unique phenomenon is more common than not.

After all, there are a lot more 28-day Februarys than 29-day ones.

Nevertheless, this year’s February has five Mondays but four each of all the other days. The next time we get another such February will be after 28 years; that is in the year 2044. Again, the reason is quite simple: there is a leap year every four years and seven

days per week, thus 7 x 4 = 28.

Inside every century, the calendar repeats a 28-year cycle. For example, the calendar for 2044 will be identical to that of 2016. Then 2045 will be the same as 2017 and so on. However, the cycle will break down in 2100 because that will not be a leap year.

If you didn’t know, a century year has a 29-day February only if it is divisible by 400. Thus 1900 was not a leap year and neither will 2100. 2000 was a leap-year because 2000 divided by 400 is five. For this reason, the calendar repeats an 11,200-year cycle – 28 years time 400 = 11,200. But still; this is before we account for the date of Easter. The cycle of Easter dates repeats after 5,700,000 years!