Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

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Anyway, I distract myself – while it is worth reading this book if only to see the near endless number of ways we can stuff things up, there are other joys involved here. He put forward the Swiss Cheese model of disasters, which looks at the whole system, instead of focusing on individual people. Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations--that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes. If you ever have access to a friend’s phone, go into the settings and change their calendar to the Buddhist one.

I loved his rant on why phone numbers aren't numbers at all (would it be meaningful for someone to ask you what half your phone number is? It isn’t exactly a compliment, but it almost always implies a fondness for the person being spoken about.

When the exercise class on the twelfth floor had ‘The Power’, the thirty-eighth floor started shaking around ten times more than it normally did. Matt Parker is a former maths teacher who communicates about mathematics via YouTube videos, stand-up comedy, and books. I was thinking some of my maths teacher friends might enjoy it and find it useful for illustrations in class.

The topics covered in this book are wide-ranging, and a lot of them are things you might not even think of as being mathematical (putting a padlock on a door properly, for instance, or people with names that get ignored by computer code).It’s a bit like a meme I saw early in the pandemic showing right angle triangles with all sides being 1. The problem was that the starting value of 52,000 was a rounded figure with only two significant figures and now, suddenly, it had five. In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and a time when humankind may no longer exist.

Misplaced decimals, misunderstood calculator quirks, bridges and buildings that resonate at unfortunate frequencies, and everyday folk who lack the understanding of how to divide numbers with units, make up many of the fascinating anecdotes in this book. But at least now I have a framed letter from the UK government saying that they don’t think accurate maths is important and they don’t believe street signs should have to follow the laws of geometry.This happened to the Patriot Missiles that were deployed to protect against incoming missiles during the Desert Storm operation. About half of the chapters I did find genuinely interesting (eg how clocks in computer operating systems can be designed to count down from some very high number on the assumption that time zero will be well beyond the expected operating life of the system - guess what? I'm one of those people who got labelled "bad at math" at a young age because I struggled with arithmetic (and still do).