Today is a square day, in fact in two ways

It happens that 9272025 = 3045^2, while if you write your dates in British style, 27092025 = 5205^2. I wonder if this phenomenon ever repeats. Unfortunately, the ISO (and Quebec) date notation 20250927 is not a square.

I wrote a program to test all dates between 1 AD and 9999 AD. There are only 34 that work. However a lot of them work only because the month number and day number are equal. I think those don’t really count. If you omit those, there are only seven (or arguably five because two are paired: 1/3/225 = 3/1/225 and 4/12/900 =12/4/900). The last one before today was over a thousand years ago, on 4 December 900. The next one after today will be almost a thousand years from today, on 22 April 3025. So today is indeed a very special day.

Here’s the full list (asterisks mark the ones with equal day and month):

* 01/01/25
* 04/04/100
  01/03/225
  03/01/225
* 09/09/225
* 07/07/281
  04/12/900
  12/04/900
* 03/03/1081
* 06/06/1444
  09/27/2025
* 01/01/2036
* 02/02/2084
* 08/08/2649
  04/22/3025
* 05/05/3504
* 01/01/4049
* 04/04/4121
* 12/12/4324
* 03/03/4564
* 02/02/4929
* 11/11/5556
* 07/07/5600
  01/15/5625
* 10/10/6041
* 01/01/6064
* 09/09/6256
* 06/06/6369
* 02/02/7776
* 05/05/8001
* 03/03/8049
* 01/01/8081
* 04/04/8144
* 08/08/8336

ETA: Oh, and none of them have a square ISO date.

That will be my 1063rd birthday! And is also 1000 years beyond my current age.

Excellent work!

This works only if you always use 4 digit years. For example, 010125 is not a square, although 01010025 is.

Note that most–though not all of the years are also square. This is true of all the non-starred examples, that is those with day not the same as month. For example, 2025 = 45^2; 3025 = 55^2. One day a waiter at a Chinese restaurant, inferring from our conversation that we were a groups of mathematicians, taught us a rule for squaring a 2 digit number ending in a 5. If the number is n5 then multiply n*(n+1) and append 25. Actually, this works even if n is not a single digit.

Yes, I was using 4-digit years. It seemed best to use a consistent format for all dates. If you don’t use 4-digit years, these are the matches before 1000 AD. (The matches after 1000 AD are of course the same as I listed upthread.)

* 02/02/5
* 07/07/56
* 01/01/124
* 08/08/201
* 12/12/201
  10/30/225
* 07/07/281
* 04/04/496
* 02/02/500
* 05/05/521
* 03/03/601
* 01/01/761
* 06/06/841

Notice that the unstarred one is still in a square year. This method allows you to get past year 9999, although I don’t advise it.

Note that now all the unstarred ones are in years divisible by 25. Strange.