The last times May 4 was on a Thursday were 2006, 2017 and 2023. The Core 2 wasn’t released until July of 2006 so I’d guess the correct year is 2017, but even then the hardware was already pretty dated. For reference, in 2017 the first generation Ryzen prozessors and Intel Kaby Lake (7th generation Core i) were around.
That requires neither engineering-level math nor paper nor patience. All you need is the chain rule and some basic knowledge of sine and cosine:
The derivative of cos is -sin, but because of the 6x you get an extra factor 6. The sine function is periodic on 2pi, so sin(6*2pi + pi/2) = sin(pi/2) = 1. So the result is -36