Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors, 2019, reviewed

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors, 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors, by Matt Parker available from Amazon here.

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.

You know a book must be interesting when your teenagers steal it from you to read it, not once but twice. We finally got to finish reading this to review it once we could extract it from their fingers. While wanting to be cool and diffident they still said they enjoyed it, and one we could even hear laughing out loud as they read it. These are all good validations for the joy and value of still reading books in hardcopy, and having them lying around your house to allow other random visitors to pick it up too.

Parker covers a range of interesting topics, where a lack of solid understanding of maths by humans has led to both comic and also, sadly, tragic, consequences. Either way Parker’s book does help to raise awareness of both the beauty of maths, and the problems we can face when it is understood imperfectly. He is also currently touring and recently performed several shows at the Edinburgh festival so it is heartening to see that there is an interest in these topics.

We’d recommend it, and as demonstrated by our teenagers swiping it several times, this is clearly a book that appeals across the generations too!

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