Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Struggling to keep track of the count of the endless Sundays after Trinity, I became curious about the method used to calculate the date of Easter. This in turn led to to a Metonic cycles, a whole load of clever Medieval attempts to nail down the correct date, and eventually to a handful of lines of python:

from datetime import datetime

def easter(year):

    year = int(year)

    a = year % 19
    b, c = divmod(year, 100)
    d, e = divmod(b, 4)
    
    f, r = divmod(b + 8, 25)
    g, r = divmod((b - f) + 1, 3)
    h = ((19 * a) + (b - d - g) + 15) % 30

    i, k = divmod(c, 4)

    L = (32 + (2 * e) + ((2 * i) - h - k)) % 7
    m, r = divmod(a + (11 * h) + (22 * L), 451)

    month, day = divmod((h + L) - (7 * m) + 114, 31)
    day += 1
    
    return datetime(year, month, day)

Because once you know the date of Easter, the remaining moveable feasts are almost easy to work out...

After a lazy day spent reading and catching, I got down to cooking supper while pater helped my niece cram for her imminent GCSE maths exam. Even though she was doing the easier paper, I was surprised by how easy it was: I don't think it covered anything that I hadn't learnt by the end of my second year of senior school.

Still, the girl seemed to find it tough going. She's hoping to get a C in November, with the possibility of a re-sit in the summer if she doesn't get the grade she needs for sixth form; pater, on the other hand, is clearly if unrealistically hoping that she'll somehow find a way to study hard enough to be able to take the more difficult paper in June. Sometimes I think we — both children and grandchildren — have let him down by not being better at mathematics...

ETA: I completely forgot to mention my niece's unexpected — to me, at least — interest in philosophy. For some reason, she mentioned that some of her friends had visited Auschwitz as part of their philosophy and ethics course. I transformed this into a few comments about Kant's argument that it is always wrong to lie — something I hazily remembered Kant justifying in terms of the Categorical Imperative — and after she mentioned that she was interested in studing P&E in the Sixth Form, we went on to talk about William Paley's watchmaker argument and where it falls down.

I'm very excited by the idea of another philosopher in the family!