Leap Year Origins And Other Weird Facts (INFOGRAPHIC)

If you've been anywhere near a calendar, you know that 2012 is a leap year, but you may not know why or how it started.

However, CheapSally.com, an online coupon retailer has created an infographic that explains the weird origins of the once-every-four-year event and other strange facts.

For instance, Karin Henriksen of Norway has given birth to three kids on three different leap days: 1960, 1964 and 1968, and the first Playboy Club ever opened in Chicago on February 29, 1960.

Comments

[blissfully zen]

01:12 PM on 02/24/2012

This sounds like the beginning of a good elementary riddle:

Jonathan and Joshua were born identical twins, and born moments apart; however, their birthdays are four years and a day apart. On Jonathan's first birthday, he turns one, while Joshua is now three but turns four the day after. How is this?

I've done a quick search online to see if I could find any twins born moments apart on midnight, on leap year, but haven't found on yet. Does anyone here know of an authenticated case like this? Well, I'd hate to be born on the 29th of February.

[Rosella Alm]

10:32 PM on 02/22/2012

I seem to remember that at the turn of the 21st Century we also had a Leap Second, didn't we?

[phal4875]

01:52 PM on 02/13/2012

Calculations for Leap Day seemed to create big problems for the Y2K issue back in the late 1990s into 2000. It turned out that Y2K was severely (quoting Romney's term for his governorship) over-hyped.

[fisheyez]

02:36 PM on 02/09/2012

The chances of being born on Feb. 29 are NOT 1:1,461 as stated. This is just looking at a 4-year cycle, which is even demonstrated in the graphic as not being an accurate enough representation of leap year frequency.

The true chances would be 1:1,506.15464. The way you would accurately calculate this is to first realize that a leap cycle lasts 400 years before repeating the pattern. So, we take the total number of days in 400 years (146,097), and divide by the total number of leap days in that 400 year span (97 leap days). This gives you a ratio of 97:146,097, or in other words 1:1,506.15464.

[phal4875]

01:55 PM on 02/13/2012

I would not swear this is true, but when I worked on Y2K issues, I believe that years divisible by 4,000 were not leap years. The years 4000 CE and 8000 CE would not, by that reasoning, be leap years.