Happy Easter! Since Easter played a key role in moving away from the Julian calendar, it seems fitting to talk about the adoption of the Gregorian calendar today.
As mentioned earlier, the Roman calendar had been having all sorts of problems until the time of Julius Caesar, who right before his death got everything back on track by adding a leap day (a second February 24th) every four years. This worked really well except for one small problem: the solar year isn’t exactly 365.25 days long, it’s about 11 minutes/year less than that. But 11 minutes is hard to notice, so everything seemed hunky dory for a very long time. Click to read more about the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and the fun that came along with different countries adopting it at different times!
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