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.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Because years, months, and days don't mesh simply, calendar making has been a challenge throughout history. Dershowitz and Reingold's compendium, here in its third edition, has already established itself as the definitive reference on calendrical structures. Their manual displays conversions between all the major calendar systems as well as between many fascinating schemes from bygone civilizations." Owen Gingerich, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"One of the most fascinating books I've read all year. Takes chronology into the computer age with impressive erudition and elan. Just finding out what the calendar rules are is usually close to impossible; Calendrical Calculations tell you how to use them too. A must for everyone who worries about days, months, years - and why they never quite fit." Ian Stewart
"A good, comprehensive documentation of software for calculating dates on very many calendars." P. Kenneth Seidlmann, Director of Astronomy, U.S. Naval Observatory
"One of those rare books that is both an authoritative reference source and a fun read." Danny Hillis
"The book is a definitive account of the world's major calendars and how to use them. It will be of interest not only to mathematicians, but also to historians and laymen. The authors are to be congratulated on a splendid research job." Martin Gardner
"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
"One of the most fascinating books I've read all year. Takes chronology into the computer age with impressive erudition and elan. Just finding out what the calendar rules are is usually close to impossible; Calendrical Calculations tell you how to use them too. A must for everyone who worries about days, months, years - and why they never quite fit." Ian Stewart
"A good, comprehensive documentation of software for calculating dates on very many calendars." P. Kenneth Seidlmann, Director of Astronomy, U.S. Naval Observatory
"One of those rare books that is both an authoritative reference source and a fun read." Danny Hillis
"The book is a definitive account of the world's major calendars and how to use them. It will be of interest not only to mathematicians, but also to historians and laymen. The authors are to be congratulated on a splendid research job." Martin Gardner
"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
Book Description
This new edition of the popular calendars book expands the algorithmic 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. LISP code for all the algorithms are available on the Web.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
72 of 86 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
If it were possible to give this book a ZERO rating, I would have done so. Right on page xxi, the authors purport to license their "Functions (code, formulas, and calendar data)" subject to both copyright and unspecified pending PATENT claims, and to restrict the use of such "Functions" to "strictly personal use." This is a book review, not a tutorial on patent law, so I don't even want to comment on the dubious validity of a PATENT claim covering purely mathematical functions. The authors are entitled to copyright protection on their actual source code examples, but asserting PATENT claims over mathematical functions is fundamentally abusive to the reader. As a result, if you have any practical goal for the information in this book and are considering it for other than mere personal amusement value, buy some other book instead. The license is particularly egregious since, on page xix, the authors explicitly acknowledge that all but two of the historical calendars are represented in GNU Emacs from the Free Software Foundation, proponent of the "copyleft" GNU General Public License!
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
The book explains the structure of 14 calendars, and gives easily comprehensible formulae for the conversion of a date in any of these calendars into a day count, and back to the calendar date. It also includes many holidays for these calendars.
Rather than on the history of calendars or their cultural background, the focus is on a lucid, correct, and complete exposition of their functional principles. Extensive bibliographic references are given to the primary sources for each calendar.
A highlight is the complete specification of several calendars depending on fairly precise timings of astronomical phenomena (Chinese calendar and some Hindu religious calendars).
To make it self-contained, the book explains the necessary mathematical and astronomical background. The astronomical models are taken from the classic 1991 book "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus.
I especially like the presentation of the calendrical formulae in an essentially non-algorithmic manner, using normal mathematical notation. This makes it easy to further analyze these formulae.
For instance, if one wants to know how good an approximation to the spring equinox is March 21 in the Gregorian calendar, one finds from the formula on page 36 in the book that midnight of March 21 in Gregorian year Y is exactly
Y·365.2425 - (Y mod 4)·97/400 + (floor(Y/4) mod 25)·3/100 - (floor(Y/100) mod 4)/4
days after midnight of March 21 in Gregorian year 0, which ranges from Y·365.2425 - 1.4775 up to Y·365.2425 + 0.72. Thus, even assuming the Gregorian approximation of 365.2425 days to the tropical year, spring equinoxes are distributed over at least three dates in March in the Gregorian calendar.
Such reasonings would be very difficult if the book specified the calendars only in terms of programming language code.
The formulae are designed so that it is easy to incorporate them into code written in the programming language of your choice. This use is further supported by a set of test dates in an appendix. Another appendix lists an example implementation of all the formulae, in the programming language Common Lisp. This code (intended for personal use) can also be downloaded from the internet.
But this book is much more than a collection of programming recipes for many calendars -- it makes you understand the structure of those calendars. Ambitious readers can even find the data and the methods to construct their own calendrical formulae.
What would I like to be changed in the book? Not much. Some of the calendrical formulae could be further simplified, the astronomical terminology could be modernized in places, and perhaps some additional historical information could be added. And, of course, even more calendars! For instance, some of the proposed reformed calendars, a more widespread version of the Persian calendar, or an historic Japanese calendar.
This book is a must for everybody wanting reliable and highly readable information on the functional principles of the world's calendars.
Michael Deckers
36 of 43 people found the following review helpful
By John
Format:Paperback
An excellent book on the history and workings of various calendars. But don’t use the source code! The licensing agreement is a trap. Use the code in GNU Emacs from the Free Software Foundation distributed under the General Public License. It does everything the authors code does (except for two obscure calendars) and it's free and always will be.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is THE source for calendrical algorithms
If you need to calculate a leap month start in a traditional Korean calendar this is a book for you. Read more
Published 12 days ago by Grigory Yakushev
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lot of what you need to understand calendars
I am amazed by the clarity and "simplicity" of the text in the book.
Calendars are not simple at all, but the approach taken by the authors makes the algorithms involved very... Read more
Calendars are not simple at all, but the approach taken by the authors makes the algorithms involved very... Read more
Published on March 12, 2008 by Enrico Spinielli
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent 3rd edition has algorithms that are hard to find
This is an interesting little book that provides a unified algorithmic presentation for more than two dozen calendars of current and historical interest. Read more
Published on February 19, 2008 by calvinnme
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ignore the reviewers virtualtraveler and "A reader"
The reason why these people use the code in Emacs is that they wrote it. The authors virtually created the field of computerised calendaring, and then published the algorithms in... Read more
Published on February 19, 2005 by D. J Pigott
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just what I needed.
In the course of building a 10,000 year clock I needed to know a lot of obscure details about various calendar systems. Read more
Published on January 18, 1999 by Danny Hillis
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is *the* calendar book.
Over the last six years or so, I have written and maintained a Hebrew Calendar program. In writing it, The ideas and published source code of Dershowitz and Reingold have always... Read more
Published on October 2, 1998
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent source for calculations of many world calendars.
This book contains conversion routines for many of the world calendars (ancient and modern). It also contains some hisorical background. Read more
Published on August 23, 1998 by ira.lund@cf-software.com
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