Excellent article, and very useful for programming. For figuring out the day of the week in your head, there's a different (and very useful) trick. It uses the month and day from the Gregorian calendar, rather than the day number, because 99% of the time that's what you'll be wanting: "Which day of the week will August 31st, 2026 be?"

The trick is to notice that in any year, leap year or not, the following dates will be the same day of the week in any year: 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12. (Whether you use the month/day style favored in America, or the day/month style that the rest of the world uses, either way those dates are the same, which is convenient). Which day of the week those dates are will vary from year to year: this year (2026) those are all Saturdays, last year they were all Fridays, next year they will all be Sundays. But in any given year, those dates are separated by 63 days, a multiple of seven, so they are always going to be the same day of the week.

And that's not all: look at 5/9, 9/5, 7/11, and 11/7 — those are also that same day of the week! (Again, conveniently, this works whether you're using the American calendar style or the rest of the world). Those odd-numbered dates can easily be remembered with the mnemonic phrase "a 9-to-5 job at 7-11". And voila, you have memorized one "special" day in nine of the twelve months. (What you do for January, February, and March I will cover later).

Now I'll pause and explain why this is useful. Many of you have already made the intuitive leap to figure this out, but it's still useful to see it spelled out. If you're trying to figure out what day of the week a certain date, let's say August 31st, is going to be, then you find the "key" date for that month (August 8th), and remember that this year, those key dates are Saturdays. (I don't yet have a good mnemonic for easily remembering which key date is which for each year; I'd welcome suggestions if you can think of one). So, 8/8 was a Saturday. Therefore, August 15th and 22nd and 29th are Saturdays. Therefore, August 31st will be a Monday this year. All of that is math you can easily do in your head in seconds.

Now, January, February, and March. March is always the same in every year: March 7th. 14th, 21st, and 28th are the "key days" that are the same day as 4/4 et al. But the way I prefer to memorize March is that "March 0th" (which isn't actually in March, it's the last day of February) is the "key day". That still lets me do the mental math for March easily enough, but it also reminds me that Feburary 28th or 29th, depending on whether you're in a leap year, is the "key day" for this year. Finally, for January, I use January 3rd in non-leap-years and January 4th in leap years as the "key day" that I memorize; the number 4 is strongly associated with leap years, so "leap year = January 4th" is easy to memorize, and I just have to remember that it's one day less in non-leap-years, January 3rd.

And so I just have to memorize "January 3rd or 4th" and "March 0th", plus the phrase "a 9-to-5 job at 7-11". And I can easily figure out in my head what day of the week any day of the year will be. For example, December 25th will be a Friday this year: that took me three seconds to work out in my head without looking at a calendar.

A faster way to calculate the day of the week