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Concept
Determination of the day of the week
Summary
The determination of the day of the week for any date may be performed with a variety of algorithms. In addition, perpetual calendars require no calculation by the user, and are essentially lookup tables.
A typical application is to calculate the day of the week on which someone was born or a specific event occurred.
In numerical calculation, the days of the week are represented as weekday numbers. If Monday is the first day of the week, the days may be coded 1 to 7, for Monday through Sunday, as is practiced in ISO 8601. The day designated with 7 may also be counted as 0, by applying the arithmetic modulo 7, which calculates the remainder of a number after division by 7. Thus, the number 7 is treated as 0, the number 8 as 1, the number 9 as 2, the number 18 as 4, and so on. If Sunday is counted as day 1, then 7 days later (i.e.day 8) is also a Sunday, and day 18 is the same as day 4, which is a Wednesday since this falls three days after Sunday (i.e.18 mod 7 = 4).
The basic approach of nearly all of the methods to calculate the day of the week begins by starting from an 'anchor date': a known pair (such as 1 January 1800 as a Wednesday), determining the number of days between the known day and the day that you are trying to determine, and using arithmetic modulo 7 to find a new numerical day of the week.
One standard approach is to look up (or calculate, using a known rule) the value of the first day of the week of a given century, look up (or calculate, using a method of congruence) an adjustment for the month, calculate the number of leap years since the start of the century, and then add these together along with the number of years since the start of the century, and the day number of the month. Eventually, one ends up with a day-count to which one applies modulo 7 to determine the day of the week of the date.
Some methods do all the additions first and then cast out sevens, whereas others cast them out at each step, as in Lewis Carroll's method.
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