Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors *eBook
**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. Read more
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Why Must Read Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors?
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.
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