Distribution of days in a week on Christmas
I am wondering if there is a strict argument about the probabilities of Christmas (Dec. 25) on Monday, Tuesday, ..., Sunday. My experiments give:
Sunday 0.145
Monday 0.14
Tuesday 0.145
Wednesday 0.1425
Thursday 0.1425
Saturday 0.14
Friday 0.145
It looks that they are not equal. :)
My question is: 1) How to obtain the probabilities without restricting the counts over certain range of years? 2) why Sunday is more probable than Wednesday, which is more probable than Monday, if it is true?
You have all you need to know in the comments to your question.
Assuming you are using the Gregorian calendar, then in its cycle of $400$ years there are $97$ leap years and so $365\times 400+97 = 146097$ days, which is exactly $20871$ weeks, so each cycle repeats the weekdays. All you need to do is count $400$ consecutive Christmases; you could count $2800$ or some other multiple, but it would not change the proportions.
Since $400$ is not divisible by $7$, there is no possibility that each weekday will appear the same number of times. In fact you get the following numbers:
Sunday 58
Monday 56
Tuesday 58
Wednesday 57
Thursday 57
Friday 58
Saturday 56.
Divide each of these by $400$ and you get the proportions in your question.
There is no particular reason why Sunday, Tuesday and Friday are most common; they just are. Some day(s) had to be more common than others since $400$ is not divisible by $7$; in the previously used Julian calendar, each weekday appeared four times for 25 December every $28$ years.