In message <[email protected]>, "Gerard Ashton" write
s:

>no authority is in a position to demand that December
>31, 2000, be regarded as the last day of the 20th century. 

I do belive mathematicians have done a fair bit of work on counting,
and that they are entitled to deference in this particular case.

It follows rather trivially from the fact that there were no
year zero, that the first century must contain the years [1...100] in
order to be a century.

Proof by induction will then lead you to the fact that century
number N contains the years [N*100-99, N*100]

Consequently the 20th century must be the years [1901...2000]

Q.E.D.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
[email protected]         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
_______________________________________________
LEAPSECS mailing list
[email protected]
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs

Reply via email to