February 2004
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In my February diary I posed the following brain-teaser.
Rossini was born February 29, 1792 and he died in November 1868. How many birthdays did he have?
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Solution
This question has at least five possible answers, depending on how many nits you want to
pick.
First, note that during Rossini's lifetime, February 29 occurred in the following years: 1792, 1796, 1804, 1808, 1812,
1816, 1820, 1824, 1828,
1832, 1836, 1840, 1844, 1848, 1852, 1856, 1860, 1864, and 1868. (The year 1800 is not a leap year in the Gregorian
calendar. A century-year is
only a leap year if it divides exactly by 400.) That's 19 years.
So possible answers are:
(A) One. Nobody has more than one birthday — though you may, of course, God willing, have many
birthday
anniversaries.
(B) Eighteen. Phooey to (A). Everybody uses "birthday" to mean "birthday anniversary."
And the day of your birth is not
generally considered to count among your birthdays, as can be seen from the fact that one year later you celebrate your
first
birthday.
(C) Nineteen. Phooey to (B). If the day of your birth is not a birthday, what the heck is it?
(D) Seventy-six. Any parent not possessed of a heart of stone tells a February-29 baby that "you were born
on the last day of February,
and that will be your birthday."
(E) Seventy-five. … if you apply the principle in (B).
I nursed a faint hope that Happy Jack (who was, by the way, a melancholy hypochondriac, most of whose operas were very
earnest affairs) might have
spent some time in Russia, where they kept to the Julian calendar, so that the arithmetic might be even more
convoluted … but this seems
not
to have happened. He spent most of his life commuting between Paris and various Italian cities, with occasional
excursions to Vienna and London.