eBook
English language
Published March 6, 2019 by Penguin.
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 …
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.
I really enjoyed this. As a programmer I am well aware of how maths mistakes can have big consequences. He has some great examples, some quite scary, but there is plenty of humour too.
Entertaining writing, but A Lot of these had more to do with computer data representation rather than what I'd expect in a book with the subtitle "A Comedy of Maths Errors." Probably I'm also simply not part of the audience of that book, because I knew quite a lot of these stories already!
I think I would have given more stars if I hadn't already heard a lot of these stories from the author's podcasts/YouTube channel. Still a fun and funny book. It's probably hard to make a maths book widely interesting but this manages it
So, you would expect reading about math to be boring. But, I really, really enjoyed this book. The author has a great sense of humor, and is good at describing the math errors.
I bailed on this midway through. It's trying too hard to be funny, and I wasn't getting much from it, other than not to use Excel as a database.
Don't get me wrong, I love math, and I love stories.
But it takes a real skill to tell stories about math and fill a whole book with it and keep it compelling.
This book wasn't.
Sure the stories where fun
And the math problems interesting
But math can be dry, and Matt wasn't able to keep the story moist.
An entertaining account of Math errors in science and engineering of the recent decades. And puns... so many puns...
If you love math and science, you'll probably already now most of the stores in this book. Parker just adds some (sometimes funny) jokes, but that's about it. Also very light on actual math unfortunately...
Very enjoyable and interesting read.
Making mistakes, especially when dealing with abstractions, is easy and common. In the software world, one saying is "There are no non-trivial programs without bugs." Another one goes "Testing can show the presence of bugs but never their absence." Most of us have heard of Murphy's law. I'm surprised that things tend to work as well as they do and at how confident we can be that we got things right. This book can be seen as a kind of sober celebration of this state of affairs along with some attempts to theorize about how mistakes can better be prevented by looking at how they occurred. What's more, it's often funny.
A personal note: There is one section that the author suggests you skip over if you happen to be on an airplane. I didn't do so even though I was waiting to board a plane to Amsterdam at …
Making mistakes, especially when dealing with abstractions, is easy and common. In the software world, one saying is "There are no non-trivial programs without bugs." Another one goes "Testing can show the presence of bugs but never their absence." Most of us have heard of Murphy's law. I'm surprised that things tend to work as well as they do and at how confident we can be that we got things right. This book can be seen as a kind of sober celebration of this state of affairs along with some attempts to theorize about how mistakes can better be prevented by looking at how they occurred. What's more, it's often funny.
A personal note: There is one section that the author suggests you skip over if you happen to be on an airplane. I didn't do so even though I was waiting to board a plane to Amsterdam at the time. I reasoned that giving in to fear at this point could only make matters scarier. I (and the flight) were fine.
Te enseña curiosidades donde las matemáticas han fallado para que veas realmente todo lo que funciona gracias a las matemáticas. Muy interesante y buenas explicaciones.
Jolly good read, always check your numbers peeps!
