In educational terms, our Leap Year system is the result of a scientific, astrological problem, and serves to show the influence of scientific thinking on our daily lives.
It is the perfect illustration of how a day, recorded on the edna’s School’s Calendar, might result in the investigation of topical science, history, maths, social science, and language in the classroom.
There are some events that occur pretty well every 4 years, like the Olympics and Leap Year. It is really a coincidence that these occur in the same year.
Leap Years are years with 366 days, when an extra day is added to February, the shortest month, and the last day of summer or winter (according to your hemisphere) to create a 29th day. It is an attempt to keep the calendar and the solar year in tune with each other.
Basically, leap years occur every 4 years, and years that are evenly divisible by 4 (2008, for example) have 366 days. The extra day is necessary because the actual length of a solar year is 365.242 days. And just to complicate things, the solar year is not quite 365.25 years so Leap Year does not occur in century years that are not divisible exactly by 400. Only 1 in 4 century years is a Leap Year e.g. 1600, 2000 and 2400 are leap years, but the intervening century years (e.g. 1900, 2100) are not.
The Egyptians were the first to come up with the idea of adding a leap day once every four years to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year. Credit for creating the Leap Year system however is generally given to Julius Caesar whose astronomer Sosigenes is given credit for working out how to rectify a calendar that seemed to get out of step with the seasons. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII further refined the calendar with the rule that leap day would occur in any year divisible by 4 as described above.
Variations have been a Leap week Calendar in which the months have an equal number of days (36) and the 5 days left over were celebrated as “leap week”.
The Chinese calendar had a leap year concept too.
When I was young, a child in our class had the misfortune to be born on Feb 29, and being children we cruelly pointed out that while the rest of us had a birthday every year, he was really only entitled to one every 4 years, and so when we were 10 he was only 3. It appears from my resaerch that in Scotland he would have been regarded as a “bad luck” baby.
Linguistics also play a part here - why “leap?”
The proper term for the inserted day apparently is an “intercalary day”, but it results in all celebrated festivals “leaping” one day forward.
Weddings are usually not set for 29 February, partly because for hundreds of years 29 Feb did not have legal status in British law. Contracts signed on that day (along with Sundays) were not legally binding. In other words, the British ‘leapt over’ that day as though it didn’t officially exist.
Some strange customs around Leap Year
Ladies Privelege: on 29 February, a spinster can propose marriage to an eligible man. Legend says it is the result of a bargain that St. Bridget struck with St. Patrick.
In 1888 a partial list of Lincoln’s most marriageable men was published by the Nebraska State Journal in honor of the old leap day (February 29) custom of women proposing marriage to men.
Further Resources:
http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventionsalphabet/a/leap_year.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/leap-week-calendar
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/leapyear1.html
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/28/1077677015083.html
http://www.brownielocks.com/leapyear.html
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/year/february.htm
http://www.chiff.com/a/leap-year.htm
Perhaps Leap Year is celebrated in your part of the world, or there are traditions and customs surrounding it. Leave a comment.
6 Comments
very well explained for my daughters homework, well done and thanks
great. but could have explained what is the first leap year in this century and what is the last leap year in this century?
thanks anyway.
Talia
Hello Talia
I think the rules mean that the first leap year for this century was the year 2000, and the last leap year for this century will be 2096
Hi Kerrie,
The year 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st. So the first leap year for this century is 2004.
The last leap year for this century will be 2096 as you stated. This is because although the year 2100 is part of this century, it is not a leap year.
The reason for this unexpected answer is because there was no year 0 (the number not being invented for more several centuries).
See the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century
Interesting comment Russell. The rule says that 2100 will not be a leap year because it is not divisible by 400
Hi Kerrie,
I wrote my answer in haste, and it is perhaps a little garbled.
–Yes, as you say, the year the 2100 will not be a leap year because it is not divisible by 400. It has nothing to do with the fact that there was no year zero as might be infered from my comment
–My comment ‘The reason for this unexpected answer…’ was actually referring to my first point. ie why the year 2000 is not part of the 21st century (as you might logically think.) The years go 2 BC, 1 BC, 1 AD, 2AD,…. (missing the year 0).
When this method for labeling years was created, (around the 5th-6th century AD from memory), the idea of zero was not around. Zero was only later introduced by the Arabs and brought to Europe somewhere around the 12th(?) century.
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