For more than a decade, I have used a slight variation of ISO 8601 for date and time stamps. Yesterday was 2020-02-01 and tomorrow will be 2020-02-03. Sorting chronologically is easy with this format, because it is the same as sorting by alphanumeric character. That’s true even in my modified system, where I sometimes include the day of the week in English, especially as a separator when writing the date and time together (e.g., 2020-02-02 Sun 22:35).
Two palindromic dates have occurred since I adopted this system: 2010-01-02 and 2011-11-02.
Today is 2020-02-02 — a beautiful palindrome with only two characters. I expect to be alive for the next palindrome (2021-12-02) but then that’s it. The next one after that is 2101-10-12. All things must pass.
I noticed quite independently that tomorrow is a palindromic date and discovered your posting when looking to see if others had reported this curiosity. Not too many, as it seems that ISO 8601 is about as popular as the metric system in the US. (I’m in Canada.)
But I’m surprised that you assert the next such date isn’t until 2101. What about 2030-03-02 and the six-long sequence that follows at intervals of a decade plus a month?
You are certainly correct about that! One of my students pointed that out last year too, and I forgot to correct this post.
Happy Palindrome Day to you!