Humble Pi A Comedy of Maths Errors
Ratings37
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings37
Average rating4.1
What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? How do billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? How does a building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths- computer programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks, jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
Reviews with the most likes.
Pretty fun read! More IT-focused than expected, and I've heard of many of the examples from the book but it was very entertaining (and scary) nonetheless.
The recipe is repetitive, but execution is well made and funny.
I won this book through the Goodreads giveaways, and I'm really glad I did. It's not something I would normally buy, but as a math teacher, when I saw it on the giveaway list, I thought it might be something fun. It was! I tell my kids all the time that everyone makes mistakes, and we should be celebrating those, analyzing them, learning from them. This book gets that.
Mind you the mistakes here range from the comedic (Did you know Ghandi in the Civilization games is a jerk because of a math error?) to the unimaginably tragic, so “celebrate” may be the wrong word, but the thesis is that people should not necessarily be punished for making mistakes. Generally, a lot of things have to go wrong for a mistake, a lot of people and arbitrary acts of fate share the blame, and when we punish people for mistakes, we only end up with people who “don't make mistakes” i.e., are good at avoiding blame and covering up mistakes. These mistakes aren't learned from and are destined to be repeated.
This is all told through Matt Parker's easy to understand, often humorous, TED talk style voice. Even if you're not a math expert (I'm a math teacher, but only through 5th grade... don't test me beyond that), Parker makes it very easy to understand the basics of the principles involved in the many stories. Check this out if you enjoy math, random trivia, or TED talks, and as I always tell my students, check your work!
