Or is it really a new decade? Or, who cares if the numerologists and mathematicians will tell you the new decade really starts on 2021, just like the twenty-first century really stared on 2001, not 2000. No one cares.
Every year is a new decade if you count back from it by ten. Or, every year is a the start of a new decade id you define the starting year and then count ten.
And every good newspaper has a mathematician on their staff. The New York Times has Kenneth Chang who tries to unravel in easy-to-understand language the theorems that the leading mathematicians are solving. or what again is a prime number, and why they are important to encryption.
Not to be outdone, The Wall Street Journal has Eugenia Cheng who writes a bi-weekly column in the weekend edition, 'Everyday Math.' She once had a column on check digits. (Look it up.)
Saturday's column was 'Why a New Decade Feels Momentous.' Eugenia goes on to explain that the assignment of numbers to years is wholly arbitrary, something I've often thought about. Why can't it be 1956 to a seven-year-old boy in what we call 2019? I was seven in 1956, and still marvel that I was alive when Elvis became hugely popular, or the Chevy became a classic. A seven-year-boy is still seven no matter what year it is. For my father, it was 1922, and Warren Harding was president.
Fairly simple answer. We need year uniqueness. Can't have two or more 1956s. Think of coins, car models, calendars, documents, history books, newspapers, etc. It would too confusing. Sort of like a remake of a movie with the same name. Just the other day on Turner I found out there was a 1931 version of 'The Maltese Falcon', 10 years (a decade?) before the Bogart version.
Ms Cheng tells us "mathematicians and philosophers have various views about whether numbers "really" exist. I believe that they exist as ideas, which is enough for them to be useful to us."
The reason next year is a momentous sounding 2020 is that the Western world decided to use Jesus of Nazareth as a reference point for counting years. The fact that we have 10 fingers also matters."
Unmentioned, but certainly true, is that the Jewish calendar does not resemble the Julian calendar. Where we see 2019, the Jewish calendar sees 5780. You're not going to see the ball drop in Times Square tonight and see 5781 light up.
Wikipedia tells us:
The Julian calendar was the 365-day calendar that Julius Caesar made official in 46 B.C. It replaced a calendar based on lunar cycles. The Julian calendar provided for a leap year with an extra day every four years. The adjustment ordered by Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582 subtracted 10 days from the calendar.
And boy, was everyone pissed about that. They all felt they were going to live 10 days less, therefore dying earlier. No mention how the actuaries felt about that one.
Eugenie shows her math chops by telling us that because our number system has a base of ten, that makes next year 2020, where if our base was 12 (if we had 12 fingers) next year would be 1204.
I was always pretty good at math, but I stink when the base becomes something other than 10. I'll take Ms. Cheng's word for it that next year would be 1204. It would also be something wildly different if our system was based on say seven. It all starts at the beginning.
Every year when taking that day trip into Vermont on the dark day of Saratoga racing, we go into the Northshire Book Store in Manchester and buy a calendar created by Warren Kimble, a local artist somewhat in the Norman Rockwell vein, for the coming year. Even though it's August, the calendars for the next year are already out.
Whatever year it was, when I presented the calendar to the even older fellow than me at the register I remarked that I wonder, "how high do the numbers go." He didn't get it as first, but then did.
So, next year is 2020. The only 2020 there will be, a decade starter, or ender, or not. How bad can the year have been if you're alive at the end of it writing a blog posting?
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