Doomsday drill · calendar math

What day of the week was it?

You get a date, you work it out in your head, and you hit reveal once you think you have it.

Years

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Cheatsheet ▾

Doomsday by month

1/3 (1/4)2/28 (2/29)3/144/45/96/67/118/89/510/1011/712/12

The dates in parentheses are the leap year versions of January and February.

Doomsday by century

1600 · 2000 · 2400
Tuesday
1700 · 2100 · 2500
Sunday
1800 · 2200 · 2600
Friday
1900 · 2300
Wednesday

The steps

  1. 01Start with the anchor day for the century, so 1900s is Wednesday and 2000s is Tuesday.
  2. 02Take the last two digits of the year and divide by 12, then keep the quotient, the remainder, and the remainder divided by 4 with the fraction thrown away.
  3. 03Add those three numbers to the anchor and subtract 7s until you are under 7. That weekday is the doomsday for the whole year.
  4. 04Every date in the month list above lands on that weekday, so count forward or back from the closest one to your date.

The trick is John Conway's Doomsday rule. I learned it from the It's Okay to be Smart video above, and the printable sheet is theirs.