Cool take: February is a pretty rectangle

Most months look like a jigsaw.

February 2015 is a rectangle.

Rectangles look like this: []

February is the only month where this is possible because it’s the only month that has a number of days divisible by 7, specifically 28. This means it can’t happen on a leap year because February has 29 days. Then if and only if February 1 starts on a Sunday, you get a rectangle month.

I decided to see if this occurs often so I wrote some code and found out it happens more than I thought. In the past 100 years, there have been 11 Februaries that make a rectangle.

The last pretty February was in 2009, which I didn’t notice. I didn’t notice the one before that because it was the ‘90s and I was trying too hard to be Justin Timberlake and had too much blond hair dye to notice a calendar.

2026. Schedule your tweets.

According to the great knowledge storage site Wikipedia, pretty Februaries in the past 100 years have had a lot of weather, a war, and a space thing.

Sure. Over the last 100 years, a pretty February showed up in a 6, 11, 11, 6, 11, 11, 6 repeating pattern of years. If you take out the 11s, that’s 666, which means the Illuminati is real. [citation needed]

Probably not.

Every pretty February rectangle has a Friday the 13th.

Friday the 13ths also happen more than I thought. In the past 100 years there have been 171 Friday the 13ths, which means there is one to two a year. The next one is in March.

I like shapes.

Correction: There’s an excellent thread on Reddit that takes a look at the pattern on a much longer timeframe. I was looking just at the past 100 years. The 6, 11, 11, 6 pattern only happens for a limited time, but if you’re rooting for humanity to be around for a while longer, things get weird and the pattern falls apart around 2207. Thanks to Dylan Staley for pointing this out and looking into the longer timeframe.