Fibonacci Day... or is it?

We've discussed the Fibonacci sequence previously on this blog. You can click on this link to read the earlier posts. All we need remember right now are the numbers themselves

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ....

The rule is that the next Fibonacci number can be created by adding up the two previous numbers.

Today is May 8, 2013, which is often written as 5-8-13, which means this is a Fibonacci day and the next one would be 8-13-21. Since there aren't 13 months in the year, that will be the last Fibonacci day this century.

But consider this. In the United States, we state a date in the form Month-Day-Year. It seems natural enough since most of us have done this all our lives, but note that the order in size is middle-small-big.  It might be more natural to state it in the form Day-Month-Year, which would be small-middle-big.  If we do that, today's date is the 8th day of the 5th month of the 13th year or 8-5-13.  Using that method, this year's Fibonacci day would be the 5th of August, not the 8th of May.

Side note: when it comes to time measured on a smaller scale, the whole world agrees to go from the largest unit to the smallest, hours:minutes:seconds:fractions of seconds. If we agreed to that way with the larger time units, this moment should be 2013 May 8 7:35 PM.