Did you find it odd that Easter Sunday fell on April Fool’s Day in 2018?

Did you know that the last time this happened was in 1956?

Did you know that the next this will happen again is 2029?

While April Fool’s Day has a fixed date of April 1st of every year, the date for Easter Sunday changes from year to year. Most of the time Easter Sunday is the middle of April. Because Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day fell on the same date, I wondered how often does something like this happens.

A Google search turned up a distribution table of Easter Sundays on March 22nd to April 25th from 1583 A.D. to 3,000 A.D.

How often does Easter Sunday fall on April 1st? Slightly greater than 3% of the time.

Most dates have a slightly greater than 3% chance of being Easter Sunday. Dates at opposite ends of the 34 day range have a smaller percentage chance of being Easter Sunday.

• Easter Sunday on March 22nd happens only 0.483%, the last time was 1818 and next time is 2285.
• Easter Sunday on April 25th happens only 0.737%, the last time in 1943 and next time is 2038.

If the year 2038 rings a bell, time will run out on 32-bit UNIX systems as a signed 32-bit integer can only hold all the seconds from January 1, 1970 to January 19, 2038. After that, the world will come to an end. Or maybe not. Year 2038 will probably be a bigger snooze than the Y2K bug in 2000 and the Mayan calendar in 2012.