Skip to main content

Chapter 26: Math, Date Time Calendar

Every useful program involves numbers and time. Whether you're building financial calculators, scheduling systems, data analyzers, or AI agents that reason about deadlines and timezones, you need to handle math correctly and manage time precisely. Mathematical operations and date/time handling are essential tools for building real-world applications that calculate, schedule, and work with temporal data.

This chapter teaches Python's built-in modules for these tasks using Python 3.14's modern approaches.

You'll start with the math module for validated calculations, understand how computers measure time through epochs and timestamps, then master Python 3.14's new date.strptime() and time.strptime() methods for parsing dates and times. You'll format datetime objects for display, perform date arithmetic, convert between timezones, and generate calendars with color highlighting. The chapter culminates in a complete Time Zone Converter application that integrates all concepts.

🎯 Before You Begin​

What You'll Learn​

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

  • Perform mathematical operations with validation using the math module, understanding rounding strategies and mathematical constants
  • Understand time measurement through epoch concepts and timestamps, explaining how computers track time
  • Parse dates and times using Python 3.14's new date.strptime() and time.strptime() methods for direct string-to-object conversion
  • Format and manipulate datetime with strftime patterns, perform date arithmetic using timedelta, and convert between timezones
  • Generate calendars and apply advanced math with Python 3.14's color highlighting, trigonometric calculations, and logarithms
  • Build a Time Zone Converter application integrating all math and datetime concepts with AI-native development patterns (Capstone)