Happy Square Root Day! A Kilroy_60 Celebration!!

Photograph by Kilroy_60

Leap Year comes every four years. Well, no, not every four years, because....

My birthday is 29 February and not only are there rules to determine when leap years do and don't occur, there's a formula to figure it out. It's possible that being a leaper led me to be interested in things like Square Root Day.

Yes, that's right, it's Square Root Day today and math geeks around the globe are ecstatic.

Square Root Day occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. Numerically, March 3, 2009, can be expressed as 3/3/09, or mathematically as √9 = 3, or 3² = 3 × 3 = 9.

You might call Square Root Day a calendar comet. It's a rare event that occurs only nine times in a century.

The last Square Root Day was 2 February, 2004 and the next one will take place in seven years on 4 April, 2016.

Ron Gordon, a teacher from Redwood City, California wants to drum up excitement for Square Root Day so he's staging a contest with a prize of $339.

Gordon is looking for the largest Square Root Day celebration.

If you think your square root-related event will have the highest number of people involved send an entry with a description of the event and/or photos to rgordon@seq.org.

You can snail mail your entry if you prefer to:
Ron Gordon, P.O. Box 5133, Redwood City, CA 94063.

I don't expect to win the Square Root Day contest, but I do have an event planned. I've invited 339 people to join me in smoking 9 bong hits every 33 minutes.

I've also set a blogosphere milepost publishing this post at 3:39 a.m.! Happy Square Root Day, eh.

Courtesy of The Vanity Of It All