Re: Use Vim to compute the date of Easter

On Sun, May 3, 2020 at 1:35 PM BPJ <bpj@melroch.se> wrote:
>
> Den sön 3 maj 2020 08:37Tony Mechelynck <antoine.mechelynck@gmail.com> skrev:
>
>> P.P.S. Gauss invented as a child the formula on which this method is a
>> minor improvement because he wanted to know his birthday: his mother
>> only remembered that is was "on a Wednesday, one week before Ascension
>> day". Germany had made the changeover more than 70 years before he was
>> born, so he used Gregorian computus.
>
>
> "As a child" is I guess anything from a ten to a twenty year window, depending on how old Gauss was when he learned to read/write/compute and when he was considered an adult. It would be nice to know just how old he was so we could all gasp!
>
> FWIW my granddaughter, who is incredibly smart but probably (I hope for her sake) not a genius at the level of Gauss learned to read at 4 y.o. so it wouldn't surprise me if Gauss was very young when he computed that algorithm. By comparison Mozart is said to have written down lengthy pieces of music after only one hearing at six or seven. I guess if you are a genius in some field you will be born with the talent no matter which field. I was a quadrilingual at that age, not because I was a genius (I most certainly am not!) but because by sheer luck I had been immersed into that many languages already. Kids can do some remarkable things!

I found the story in the Freench Wikipedia article about Gauss, which
says "Le petit Gauss…" ("The little Gauss") but doesn't give an age.
AFAICT, neither the English nor the Greman Wikipedia mention the story
in Gauss's biography. In the French and English articles about the
computation of the date of Easter it is said he _published_ a first
version of the method in 1800 and a corrected version in 1816 so maybe
he wasn't that much of a child anymore by then (he was born in 1777).

Best rega

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