_The r-word_ (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

> 2) They can tell you the day of the week that any date that you care
> to name fell on or will fall on, BCE or CE, in about the length of
> time that it  takes the average person to name the day of the week
> that February 21, 2012, falls on.
>

I once was at a mathematics conference where John Conway
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway ) was seated at the
same dinner table.  He taught all of the rest of us at the table a
fairly straightforward method of doing this (memorize a key day of the
week for each century; increment or decrement that day by factors
corresponding to the month, how many leap years had occurred from the
beginning of the century to the day in question, the number of years
since the beginning of the century, etc.).  He had reduced the problem
to simple arithmetic, and could do it "in about the length of time that
it takes the average person to name the day of the week".  When I
practiced regular, I was able to do it pretty quickly myself (but I
don't even remember the algorithm now).

Ed Begley Jr did it once on David Letterman's show.

You don't have to be a savant to do this particular parlor trick.

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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