The problem was religious - nobody was going to have Christ born in the year zero.
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <[email protected]> To: Leap Second Discussion List <[email protected]>, "Gerard Ashton" <[email protected]> Date: 01/14/2014 06:29 PM Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 88, Issue 31 Sent by: [email protected] 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
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