Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker (PDF)

Description

**The First Ever Maths Book to be a No.1 Bestseller**’Wonderful … superb’ Daily MailWhat makes a bridge wobble when it’s not meant to? Billions of dollars mysteriously vanish into thin air? 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.Mathematics doesn’t have good ‘people skills’, but we would all be better off, he argues, if we saw it as a practical ally. 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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Matt Parker is a delight, and an inspiration when it comes to making math(s) more fascinating, amusing, and just good ol’ fun. I had only heard of a couple stories related here. While a fair amount of attention has been given to some math(s) errors that were catastrophic and resulted in loss of life, etc., Matt did well to keep this book on the lighter, less morbid side.I absolutely love much of his YouTube presence and in-person performances, and am glad to buy both the hard cover and the audio book. Wonderfully delightful.The print version is also nice in that reading the numbers with your eyes is far quicker than to listen to someone read off a string of numbers lol

⭐This book merged a healthy dose of mathematics and humour which results in a very readable lesson in mathematics and several valuable case studies. A good book for those who use mathematics professionally, for fun or both!

⭐it gets slow at times, even over dry at points. butyou will laugh (and cringe at same time) at why airlines reboot flight computers every 72 hours or so.see logic defied as short sighted programmers have NO LESS THAN three different “Y2K” melt downswatch as millions of dollars are lost because idiots used an excel spreadsheet without thinkingsee a man disappear hundreds, maybe thousands of times ($10,000s if not $100,000s spent re-adding him because no one asked WHY?)not finished reading yet so not a real spoiler yetbut these are like the guy arrested for bank robbery because years earlier his assignment on a bank programming assignment was to get the totals to balance. his solution was he added an account to receive the fraction of a cent cut off rounding to a whole cent. the accounts balanced but his account continued to get larger every year, decades later someone asked who the millionaire was. he escaped jail because he never withdrew any money… but it’s likely he wouldn’t have been caught if he had withdrew the balance regularly. the extra per account would have averaged six cents per account per year. each account means checking, savings, Christmas, loans for each car house and vacation loan. etc. thousands of customers averaging what? 4-8 maybe 12? accountshe could likely have matched his income but he didn’t want the money, he just wanted to shut up the bureaucrat that kept yelling “the books don’t balance”

⭐I bought this for my grandson’s 8th birthday. He is a math genius and loves to watch Matt Parker on TV. I have to admit, I do too. He’s my favorite of the YouTube numberphiles. My grandson loves this book and carries it around wherever he goes. He already has a bucket list at the ripe old age of 8 & on top of the list is to meet Matt Parker!

⭐Like most other readers, I got a great deal of enjoyment from this book (and, as a civil engineer, I am well aware of how errors in decimal points or unit conversions, or creative statistics and probabilities, can cause havoc). Unfortunately the 2020 Penguin paperback edition has very small and very indistinct illustrations, which in many cases are virtually illegible. Luckily they are not vital – just reading the book is great fun – but the publishers must have known that they were putting out a somewhat sub-standard version, capitalizing on its best-seller status. Shame!

⭐Fun facts to know about hoe the designed world works. Well written with a humorous side. As a physics teacher, this is cool stuff to add that makes the subject a tad more interesting.

⭐The book is a rather comprehensive enumeration of examples where bad (or just not good enough) math can lead to surprising, or even disastrous results. It is written in an accessible language, so anyone can in theory find value in reading it. Admittedly, it has less to offer to hardcore math nerds who are already aware of many of the examples presented, but that deficiency is somewhat compensated for by the author’s wit. One relatively major nitpick I have is that for a book subtitled “comedy of math errors”, there is a depressing number of stories that end with “and then people died”. People dying is not funny, and the book doesn’t try to present it as such, but for someone looking for a cheap chuckle that may be a turn-off. I guess in this case we have to assume the author used “comedy” in a Greco-Roman sense, as how Dante’s Inferno is a “comedy”. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of chuckle-worthy content here, but there’s quite a bit of frankly depressing stuff too.

⭐This book is great. Bought it for a math guy but I even read it (English guy). Fascinating stories like you find on those shows on Discover and those neat shows. Can’t get the story out of my head about the pilot who got sucked out the front window of a plane because the maintenance guy used 87 of the wrong size screws — off by like a quarter millimeter!!

⭐The book is not aimed at maths graduates (which some reviewers seem to take offence at), but is a book of fun anecdotes about what happens when maths goes wrong. It was an entertaining read, and my 10 year old also read in one sitting. Anything that gets a 10 year old to read about maths, physics or engineering is good in my books.If you like things like the Ig Nobel’s or books by Randall Munroe, then you’ll enjoy this. If you’re looking for a serious mathematics textbook then this is not it (nor does it claim to be at any point).

⭐This book was a bit of a let down. The examples actually based on maths might have made a good magazine article, but instead we have a book typeset in a big font and padded out to over 300 pages. There are some interesting examples of “fences and posts” problems, binary numbers wrapping round to start again at 0 in computers, properties of random numbers, and errors of units and combining different levels of precision. That’s most of the maths. To make the book more interesting and longer, the author then has to borrow from other disciplines like product design, human factors and management science. A mechanic confusing two sizes of screws on an aircraft, and the process failures that allowed this to ever happen, is not really “maths”, and nor is having badly designed fire doors on a building that open inwards and jam shut in a crush. Maths may be the “queen of all sciences” but that doesn’t mean it can appropriate from other disciplines to try and make itself more interesting, without giving any credit. Instead of this book, buy “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman – it’s much better. Two stars because this is about 2/5 of a book of interesting maths examples, and 3/5 of padding appropriated from other disciplines, because apparently there isn’t enough interesting maths to make a whole book. That’s a shame, as the idea of the book was appealing, which was why I bought it.

⭐This is a fun book. It’s enjoyable and makes you want to keep reading even though you really need to get up early tomorrow.But it’s not as good as Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension.This book does show how failure to understand maths can cause horrific problems, be it mass deaths, loss of billions, or having your pilot nearly sucked out of the aeroplane cockpit. But if narrowly-averted catastophe is your thing you’d be better off reading Rachel Maddow’s Drift.In the end, I think the problem comes down to two issues. First off, is trying to put comedy and tragedy together, and secondly there’s simply not enough maths in it. There’s a bit of talk about how various things work, but little in the way of equations or in-depth exploration. Things are more limited in the real world, and those limitations make maths less interesting.If you enjoy Parker’s other work you’ll likely enjoy this, but you won’t be blown away by it.

⭐Overall, interesting and amusingly written. As a long-time user of spreadsheets, however, I found the chapter on Excel worrying. Years ago I read somewhere that about 50% of all spreadsheets contain errors. According to research cited in Humble Pi the true figure is closer to 90%. I don’t doubt the figure but thought it probably only applied to the spreadsheets that I had constructed. It is frightening to think that it also applies to really serious work.

⭐Really interesting book which covers various ways problems have been caused by maths errors. The book is written in a lighthearted way and very enjoyable even if you don’t have any particular maths knowledge (although as a mathematician I would also have enjoyed some problems to solve!).Only negative thing to say is that I was so engrossed I read it all really quickly and would like some more please.

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