A Perfect Month To Leap

He was a consummate mathematician, so he loved February. You could count on February.

February was perfect. Four perfect weeks of seven days. Exactly 28 days. Divisible by 1, 2, 4, 7, 14, and 28. Rational.

And then, every four years a prime number reared its ugly quantitative head in bisextile tyranny. Divisible by only 1 and itself, 29 blindsided rationality. Freely admitting it was a real number and a whole number, he also knew it was an irrational number.

"Perverse!" he screamed.

No integer squared gives 29. Even worse, the 29th, as a numbered day for this otherwise perfect month, was legislated. Pulled out of some politician's ass. It was stuff like this that could kill a mathematician, even one so consummate.

You want irrational? You cannot legislate arithmetic! If mathematics were arbitrarily bureaucratic, it'd be weaponized by hostile governments. Look what they've done with statistics!

Every February he considered Julius Caesar.

He's the one who invented leap years and the XXIXth of February, and look what happened to him! He should have worried more about Ides coming up!

In 1582, God Almighty Himself weighed in when Pope Gregory dogmatized it happening only in years divisible by 4.

Well, well, well, he thought, looking to push back on irrationality? Was this some sort of apology? I'm not even Catholic.

The 29th approached, so he planned ahead. Each day, starting on February 1, he'd borrow some time from the 29th and add it. So, his 29th would fall on March 1. It would take some figuring--how many minutes to add to each--but he was a consummate mathematician!

He divided all 41,760 minutes into 29 days, then added 51 minutes, 25.71426 seconds to each of the first 28 days. He stopped his clocks 51 minutes, 25.71426 seconds before each midnight, thereafter letting them resume. He laughed. He felt great. It was all too subtle for him to notice.

But his brain noticed--in a rare summation of an antagonistic dyssynergy of both pineal and hippocampal downregulation.

For on his March 1—everyone else's February 29—he dropped dead in a mathematically precise addition of irony:

His tombstone would forever read his bureaucratic, legislated date of humiliation,

Died February 29, 2024.