Sunday's date is a rare, extra-special palindrome [View all]

How’s this for a calendrical trifecta: Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday. And it’s Groundhog Day. And it’s a rare eight-digit palindrome when written as 02/02/2020 — the only one of its kind this century.

A palindrome, as you might know, is a sequence that reads the same forward as it does backward. Aziz Inan, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Portland, collects dates that are palindromes the way other people might collect coins or chase solar eclipses.

Inan’s website chronicles 500 years’ worth of palindromes, from the 19th century to the 23rd. He’s been waiting for this Sunday since at least Nov. 2, 2011, he said, which was an eight-digit palindrome, too (11/02/2011).

The previous eight-digit palindrome like this was 11/11/1111, 909 years ago. We’ll only have to wait another 101 years for 12/12/2121, but the next one after that comes on March 3, 3030.

At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/01/31/sundays-date-is-rare-extra-special-palindrome/

Period depiction of Henry I - who was king of England the last time a date fell on an eight-digit palindrome like this Sunday's.