Calendrical Calculations

by Nachum Dershowitz, Edward M. Reingold

Overview

A valuable resource for working programmers, as well as a fount of useful algorithmic tools for computer scientists, this new edition of the popular calendars book expands the treatment of the previous edition to new calendar variants: generic cyclical calendars and astronomical lunar calendars as well as the Korean, Vietnamese, Aztec, and Tibetan calendars. The authors frame the calendars of the world in a completely algorithmic form, allowing easy conversion among these calendars and the determination of secular and religious holidays. LISP code for all the algorithms are available on the Web.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107702370
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/10/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	69 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

In addition to his expertise on calendars, Nachum Dershowitz is a leading figure in software verification in general, and termination of programs in particular; he is an international authority on equational inference and term-rewriting. Other research interests of his include program semantics and combinatorial enumeration. Dershowitz has authored or co-authored over one hundred research papers and several books and has held visiting positions at prominent institutions around the globe. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He was born in 1951 and his graduate degrees in Applied Mathematics are from the Weizmann Institute in Israel. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.
Edward M. Reingold was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1945. He has an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Illinois Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. Reingold has been at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1970; he now a Professor of Computer Science there. His research interests are in theoretical computer science, especially the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery since 1995, Reingold has authored or co-authored over fifty research papers and nine books; his papers on backtrack search, generation of combinations, weight-balanced binary trees, and drawing of trees and graphs are considered classics. He has won awards for his undergraduate and graduate teaching. Reingold is intensely interested in calendars and their computer implementation: in addition to Calendrical Tabulations and Calendrical Calculations, he is the author and maintainer of the calendar/diary part of GNU Emacs.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Part I. Arithmetical Calendars: 2. The Gregorian calendar; 3. The Julian calendar; 4. The Coptic and Ethiopic calendars; 5. The ISO calendar; 6. The Islamic calendar; 7. The Hebrew calendar; 8. The Ecclesiastical calendars; 9. The Old Hindu calendars; 10. The Mayan calendar; 11. The Balinese Pawukon calendar; 12. Generic cyclical calendars; Part II. Astronomical Calendars: 13. Time and astronomy; 14. The Persian calendar; 15. The Baha'i calendar; 16. The French Revolutionary calendar; 17. The Chinese calendar; 18. The modern Hindu calendars ; 19. The Tibetan calendar; 20. Astronomical lunar calendars coda; Part III. Appendices: A. Function, parameter, and constant types; B. Lisp implementation; C. Sample data.

Editorial Reviews

Of interest to historians studying or using calendar systems, of course, but also to business people who want the correct date on automated letters to potential clients in Persian, China, and Ethiopia; for a planner who wants the new Cairo store to open at the end of Ramadan ten years from now; computer programmers developing software for such applications; and so on. In algorithmic form, explains 14 calendars and the calculations for converting between them. Among them are the recent ISO commercial calendar, Gregorian, Julian, Coptic, Bah<'a>'<'i>, French Revolutionary, Mayan, and old and new Hindu. Includes source code. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

'… this book must surely become the standard work on calendar conversions. No historian, chronologist or recreational mathematician should be without it.' E. G. Richards, Nature

'… a really attractive book, not only for specialists such as mathematicians, astronomers or computer scientists, but also for historians or for any person interested in the cultural aspects of science.' Antonio F. Rañada, European Journal of Physics

'… a splendid book, of interest to astronomers and computer scientists, and to anyone concerned with the role of science in the cultural evolution of mankind.' Antonio F. Rañada, European Journal of Physics

'This is a fascinating book to dip into, as well as being a powerful reference work assembling a rich collection of historical, astronomical and computational 'calendar' facts. If you have funds set aside for coping with the millennium bug why not spend a little of them on a copy?' William Wynne Willson, The Mathematical Gazette

From the Publisher