Re: Year 2000 and Mathematica
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg10624] Re: [mg10543] Year 2000 and Mathematica
- From: "Brett H. Barnhart" <brettb@wolfram.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 03:09:50 -0500
At 04:53 PM 1/20/98 -0500, BRagsdale wrote: >Is Mathematica 3.0 year 2000 compliant? Here is a Press Release that Wolfram sent out several months ago. Other Press Releases can be found at http://www.wolfram.com/news/ ******* Leading Math Software Undaunted by the Coming Year 2000 Or Even Two Billion Computer industry experts predict dire consequences at the beginning of the year 2000, when many computer programs are expected to lose their ability to manipulate and calculate dates properly, fatally confused by the change of century. Projections of the problem's impact on business, including a recent cover story in Newsweek magazine, range from the grim to the cataclysmic. The only pleasant prospect is for computer programmers, many of whom may need to be hired for emergency software repairs. However, the million scientists, engineers, educators and students who use Wolfram Research's Mathematica, the leading technical computing system, have nothing to fear as January 1, 2000, approaches. "We have thought a little further ahead," said Wolfram Research President/CEO Stephen Wolfram, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech at age twenty. "Mathematica stores dates and performs calendrical calculations using an arbitrary-precision mixed-radix representation that avoids the Year 2000 problem completely. We don't anticipate any problems with our calendar algorithms until a considerable time after the sun has burned itself out." "For example," Wolfram explained, "according to Mathematica the year Two Billion AD begins on a Saturday, barring any intervening modification to the calendar. There is also a more general result, which says that any year AD which is a multiple of 2000 also begins on a Saturday. That will always allow an extra working weekend for programmers who don't use our product." The Year 2000 question is only the most visible example of a larger problem concerning how computers treat numbers. Nearly all software which handles numbers makes certain assumptions about each number's size. This means that date calculations are not the only ones subject to potential "numerical overflow." Imagine a business, for example, wanting to make a half-million dollar sale to Russia. At current exchange rates, the number of rubles in a half million dollars is very close to overflowing the range of the 32-bit signed integer, a very common data size. Mathematica, however, is not bound by the limitations of fixed-size integer representation. The same precise number-handling capability used by the calendar routines also allow it to multiply numbers with hundreds of digits without the danger of numerical overflow. Wolfram Research is the world's leading developer of technical computing software. The company was founded by Stephen Wolfram in 1987 and released the first version of its flagship product, Mathematica, on June 23, 1988. Mathematica, the world's only fully integrated technical computing system, is relied on today by more than a million users worldwide in industry, government, and education. Mathematica 3.0 was released in the fall of 1996. Wolfram Research, Inc. is headquartered in Champaign, Illinois. Brett H. Barnhart Business Development Wolfram Research 100 Trade Center Dr Champaign, Il 61820 217-398-0700 ext 523 217-398-0747 (fax) brettb@wolfram.com http://www.wolfram.com/~brettb *Check out our 1998 Mathematica User Conference at http://www.wolfram.com/conference98