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Calendars > Calendrical Systems v
Calendars > Days v



Friday the Thirteenth
    

see also

The Gregorian calendar follows a pattern of leap years which repeats every 400 years. This is true since the number of days in 400 Gregorian years is


which is an exact number of weeks since it is divisible by 7 (namely, ). There are 4,800 months in 400 years, so the 13th of the month occurs 4,800 times in this interval. The number of times the 13th occurs on each weekday is given in the table below. As shown by Brown (1933), the thirteenth of the month is slightly more likely to be on a Friday than on any other day.

day number of 13s fraction
Sunday 687 14.31%
Monday 685 14.27%
Tuesday 685 14.27%
Wednesday 687 14.31%
Thursday 684 14.25%
Friday 688 14.33%
Saturday 684 14.25%

On average, there are 1.72 ( ) Friday the 13ths per calendar year. The following table summarizes Friday the 13ths for years between 2000 and 2010.

year months having Friday the 13th
2000 October
2001 April, July
2002 September, December
2003 June
2004 February, August
2005 May
2006 January, October
2007 April, July
2008 June
2009 February, March, November
2010 August

The following Mathematica code can be used to generate the counts of the number of times a given weekday occurs.

  <<Miscellaneous`Calendar`;
  days={Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday,
    Friday,Saturday,Sunday};
  c=Count[Flatten[Table[DayOfWeek[{y,m,13}],{y,2000,2399},
    {m,12}]],#]&/@days; 
  TableForm[
    {days,c,PaddedForm[#,{6,4}]&/@(100. c/Plus@@c),
    ToString//@Flatten[Position[Sort[c,Greater],#]]&/@c},
    TableDirections->{Row,Column},
    TableHeadings->{
      {"day","numbers of 13s","percentage","rank"},None
    }
  ] 

Weekday




References

Ball, W. W. R. and Coxeter, H. S. M. Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 13th ed. New York: Dover, p. 27, 1987.

Brown, B. H. "Solution to Problem E36." Amer. Math. Monthly 40, 607, 1933.

Parzen, E. Modern Probability Theory and Its Applications. New York: Wiley, pp. 26-27, 1960.

Press, W. H.; Flannery, B. P.; Teukolsky, S. A.; and Vetterling, W. T. Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN: The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 14-15, 1992.







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