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Published: 05/03/2020
Fascinating and eye-opening, Humble Pi explains what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. From Roman Empire and street signs to elections, lotteries and the internet, Parker explores the hitches and near-misses that have coloured the history of maths in this eloquent, highly entertaining read.
What 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.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141989143
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 247 g
Dimensions: 196 x 128 x 18 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
Matt Parker has pulled off something wonderful . . . his stories are superb. - Marcus Berkmann, The Daily Mail
Parker is consistently very funny . . . highly entertaining. - The Guardian
Numbers to die for. Four stars. - Simon Griffith, Mail on Sunday
Bought it yesterday, enjoying it enormously, well done! - Dara Ó Briain, Twitter
I just finished the new book by irrepressible maths enthusiast @standupmaths, and it's GREAT! - Adam Savage, ex-host of 'Mythbusters', Twitter
An entertaining and often alarming journey through the numerical blunders made over the years. - The Big Issue
Very funny. . . a compendium of stories about mathematical failures; some are amusing, others alarming, as in the case of the passenger aircraft that ran out of fuel because it had been measured in the wrong units - Telegraph Books of the Year
The surprise bestseller that makes maths fun - Sunday Times Magazine
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 - Ryan North, author of How to Invent Everything
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“Humble Pi”
Such an amazing book! It’s just what I would expect from Matt Parker, he’s so funny.
“funny, accessible and clever”
From the more practical and life-threatening, like causing planes to crash, to the more psychological, like how people use faulty logic to pick lottery numbers, this funny and enlightening book shows how simple... More
“Glad I bought this”
All sorts of extraordinary events and mishaps, some humorous, some disastrous, with well put mathematical explanations. And there's no need to read it all at once, you can dip in and savour a section.
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