Getting the Date of Some Day of Last Week

In learning how to get the date of a day of the week from the previous week (e.g. the date of Monday from the previous week), I found the following two expressions coming up commonly, where you change the very last number (e.g. 0=Monday) depending on which day you want:

SELECT DATEADD(wk, DATEDIFF(wk, 6, GETDATE()), 0)

SELECT DATEADD(wk, DATEDIFF(wk, 7, GETDATE()), 0)

Both seem to return the correct Date 2017-05-29 when I run it today (2017-06-17).

My question is - how does this work? It seems to be getting a count of weeks since 6 or 7 weeks after 1900-01-01? And why does it work with both a 6 and 7?

Also, are there edge cases one would need to be aware of where it might not give the expected results?

This takes advantage of the fact that 1900-01-01 is a Monday. So adding n number of weeks will also be a Monday.

Here are the datetime values that are being represented by the integers in that expression:

dateadd(week, datediff(week, 7 /*'19000108'*/, getdate()), 0 /*'19000101'*/)

Adding the number of weeks since 1900-01-08 (the week after the first Monday) to 1900-01-01 returns one week less than the current week, i.e. Monday of last week.

These three are equivalent:

select dateadd(week, datediff(week, 7 , getdate()), 0)
select dateadd(week, datediff(week, '19000108', getdate()), '19000101')
select dateadd(week, datediff(week, 0, getdate())-1, 0)

rextester demo: http://rextester.com/BQX59903

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#175648, answer score: 9