Easter BirthDates

...by Robert Lipe

I was an April baby. As a boy, my mother used to wonder when my birthday would fall on Easter. We never figured it out, but I was sure some kind of awesome cake was involved.

With later access to research material, I learned the rule for determining when Easter falls is approximately "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring."

Like so many rules of time - especially those used over hundreds of years when calendars got regularly shuffled by Popes and reflecting our changing understanding of celestial motion - it's more complicated than that. Because of course it is.

In 2003, I was bored and decided to overkill it with some programmer stuff and share the answer with my Aries(ish) friends. As we do. When does your birthday fall on Easter?

I pulled the formula from the U.S Navy (no, I have no idea why the Navy cares about Easter...Eight year old Robert probably liked to think it involved detonating Peeps in the ocean.) and wrote a tiny program so my friends with birthdays between March 22 and April 25 would never have to wonder the same.

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