Change the date format

A bit of perl ought to do the trick...

[user@localhost /tmp/ee]$ cat data
1815/11/02      Boole, George
1864/06/22      Minkowski, Hermann
1854/04/29      Poincare, Jules Henri
1877/09/11      Jeans, James Hopwood
1826/09/17      Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard
[user@localhost /tmp/ee]$ cat conv.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl -n

@mon = ("",
        "January",
        "March",
        "March",
        "April",
        "May",
        "June",
        "July",
        "August",
        "September",
        "October",
        "November",
        "December"
);
next unless (\/^(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\s+([^,]+),\s*(.*)$/);

$year = $1; $mon = $2; $day = $3;
$last = $4; $first = $5;

printf "%s %s (%s %d, %d)\n",
        $first, uc($last), $mon[$mon], $day, $year;

[user@localhost /tmp/ee]$ cat data | ./conv.pl
George BOOLE (November 2, 1815)
Hermann MINKOWSKI (June 22, 1864)
Jules Henri POINCARE (April 29, 1854)
James Hopwood JEANS (September 11, 1877)
Georg Friedrich Bernhard RIEMANN (September 17, 1826)
[user@localhost /tmp/ee]$

... prolly a programatic way to find the name of the month using strftime() instead of a predefined array but it doens't seem worth the effort here.  Should probably also report bogus lines istead of just ignoring them so...

next unless (\/^(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\s+([^,]+),\s*(.*)$/);

... should be more like...

unless (\/^(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)\s+([^,]+),\s*(.*)$/) {
       print STDERR "unrecongised line: $_";
       next;
}