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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

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.
© 1996-2007 Eric W. Weisstein
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