Calculating the day of the week

There are various methods to calculate the day of the week for any particular date in the past or future. These methods ultimately rely on algorithms to determine the day of the week for any given date, including those based solely on tables as found in perpetual calendars that require no calculations to be performed by the user. A typical application is to calculate the day of the week on which someone was born or any other specific event occurred.

To determine the day of the week from numerical operations, Sunday through Saturday are represented as numbers which may, corresponding to Sunday being the first day of the week, be 1 to 7 (or 0, rejecting whole sevens) respectively, which is equivalent to ISO 8601's alternative usage of 1 = Monday to 7 = Sunday). This is achieved with arithmetic modulo 7. Modulo 7 is an operation that calculates the remainder of a number being divided by 7. Thus the number 7 is treated as 0, 8 as 1, 9 as 2, 18 as 4 and so on; the interpretation of this being that if Sunday is signified as day 1, then 7 days later (i.e. day 8) is also a Sunday, and day 18 will be the same as day 4, which is a Wednesday since this falls three days after Sunday.

The basic approach of nearly all of the methods to calculate the day of the week begins by starting from an ‘anchor date’: a known pair (such as January 1, 1800 as a Wednesday), determining the number of days between the known day and the day that you are trying to determine, and using arithmetic modulo 7 to find a new numerical day of the week.

One standard approach is to look up (or calculate, using a known rule) the value of the first day of the week of a given century, look up (or calculate, using a method of congruence) an adjustment for the month, calculate the number of leap years since the start of the century, and then add these together along with the number of years since the start of the century, and the day number of the month. Eventually, one ends up with a day-count to which one applies modulo 7 to determine the day of the week of the date.

Some methods do all the additions first and then cast out sevens, whereas others cast them out at each step, as in Lewis Carroll's method. Either way is quite viable: the former is easier for calculators and computer programs; the latter for mental calculation (it is quite possible to do all the calculations in one's head with a little practice). None of the methods given here perform range checks, so unreasonable dates will produce erroneous results.

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