Happy Solstice!–Happy New Year!

This year’s winter solstice took place at 4:19 UTC on 22 December 2019, when the Sun on it’s apparent annual journey along the ecliptic reached its southern most point at the Tropic of Capricorn turning to begin its journey back up to the Tropic of Cancer and the summer solstice.

Stonehenge Winter Solstice

Here at the Renaissance Mathematicus this marks the natural end of one year and the beginning of a new one, so I wish all of my readers a happy solstice and a happy new year and may the next 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds bring you much light, joy, peace and wisdom. We can only hope that they will be better than the last 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds (length of the mean tropical or solar year).

 

There is no year zero!

I realise that in writing this post I am wasting my time, pissing against the wind, banging my head against a brick wall and all the other colourful expressions in the English language that describe embarking on a hopeless endeavour but I am renowned for being a pedantic curmudgeon and so I soldier on into the jaws of disappointment and defeat. I shall attempt to explain carefully and I hope clearly why the 31^st of December of the year 2019 does not mark the end of the second decade of the 21^st century. I know, I know but I must.

The core of the problem lies in the fact that we possess two basic sets of counting numbers, cardinals and ordinals. Now cardinals have nothing to do with the Holy Roman Catholic Church, a family of birds or a baseball team from St. Louis but are the numbers we use to say how many items there are in a group, a collection, a heap or as the mathematician prefer to call it a set. Let us look at a well-known example:

I’ll sing you twelve, O

Green grow the rushes, O

What are your twelve, O?

Twelve for the twelve Apostles

Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,

Ten for the ten commandments,

Nine for the nine bright shiners,

Eight for the April Rainers.

Seven for the seven stars in the sky,

Six for the six proud walkers,

Five for the symbols at your door,

Four for the Gospel makers,

Three, three, the rivals,

Two, two, the lily-white boys,

Clothed all in green, O

One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so.

This is the final round of an old English counting song the meaning of several lines of which remain intriguingly obscure. Starting with the fourth line from the top we have a set of 12 Apostles i.e. the original twelve follower of Jesus. One line further in, we have a set of 11, who went to heaven, presumably the Apostles minus Judas Iscariot. And so we proceed, each line refers to a group or set giving to number contained in it.

In everyday life we use cardinal numbers all the time. I bought 6 eggs today. There are 28 children in Johnny’s class. My car has 4 wheels and so on and so forth. The cardinal numbers also contain the number zero (0), which indicates that a particular group or set under discussion contain no items at all. There are currently zero kings of France. We can carry out all the usually simple arithmetical operations–addition, subtraction, multiplication and division–on the cardinal numbers including zero, with the exception that we can’t divide by zero; mathematicians say division by zero is not defined. So if Johnny’s class with its 28 members are joined by Jenny’s class with 27 members for the school trip there will be 55 children on the bus. I’m sure you can think up lots of other examples yourselves.

Ordinal numbers have a different function, there signify the position of items in a list, row, series etc. We also use different names for ordinal numbers to cardinal numbers, so instead of one, two three four…, we say first, second, third, fourth…etc. an example would be, Johnny was the fifth person in his class to get the flu this winter. Now, in the ordinal numbers there is no zero, it would be a contradiction in terms, as it can’t exist. Occasionally when there is an existing ordered list of principles or laws people will talk about the ‘zeroeth’ law, meaning one that wasn’t originally included but that they think should precede the existing ones.

When we talk about years we tend to use the words for cardinal numbers but in fact we are actually talking about ordinal numbers. What we call 2019 CE or AD i.e. two thousand and nineteen is in fact the two thousand and nineteenth year of the Common Era or the two thousand and nineteenth year of Our Lord. Whichever system of counting years one uses, Gregorian, Jewish, Muslim, Persian, Chinese, Hindu or whatever there is and never can be a year zero, it is, as stated abve, a contradiction in terms and cannot exist. Therefore the first decade, that is a group of ten year, in your calendrical system consists of the years one to ten or the first year to the tenth year, the second decade the years eleven to twenty or the eleventh year to the twentieth year and so on. The first century, that is a group of one hundred years, consists of the years one to one hundred or the first year to the one-hundredth year. First millennium, that is one thousand years, consists of the years one to one thousand or the first year to the one-thousandth year.

Going back to our starting point the first decade of the 21^st century started on the 1^st January 2001 and finished on the 31^st December 2010. The second decade started on the 1^st January 2011 and will end on the 31^st December 2020 and not on 31^st December 2019 as various innumerate people would have you believe.