Matt Parker (1)Rezensionen

Humble Pi is about math errors causing problems in life, e.g. buildings and bridges collapsing or needing repaired, airplane disasters and near misses, financial ruin for companies, video game glitches, medical problems.

There were a few parts of the book that dragged a bit, but all in all it held my interest well.

Mostly anecdotes about math or engineering errors that had real-world consequences. As someone with a background in math, I didn't feel like I got a lot out of it, but it was kind of fun anyway.

Matt Parker's Humble Pi is exactly what it says in its subtitle, a comedy of maths errors. Parker takes a look at different errors that are related to mathematics and they largely stem from the areas of programming and engineering.

I like the statement that mathematicians are not specifically people who find maths easy, they are just people who enjoy how hard it is. Having seen how hard higher mathematics can be, I can relate to that. If you are willing to engage with the problems and give mathematics a chance, you can always get something out of it and solving problems can be quite rewarding actually. This is probably an attitude that many people do not have anymore as it commands a lot of attention and focus. As for the book, I found the stories Parker had to tell quite interesting and they made for a fun and breezy read. 4.5 stars.½

There are some great quotes from this book that I have read/plan on reading to my university calculus classes (who are mostly non-majors).

"All humans are stupid when it comes to learning formal mathematics. This is the process of taking what evolution has given us and extending our skills beyond what is reasonable. We were not born with any kind of ability to intuitively understand fractions, negative numbers, or the many other strange concepts developed by mathematics, but, over time, your brain can slowly learn how to deal with them. We now have school systems that force students to study math and, through enough exposure, our brains can learn to think mathematically. But if those skills cease to be used, the human brain will quickly return to factory settings." - Pg. 307

"Because we all make mistakes. Relentlessly. And that is nothing to be feared. Many people I speak to say that, when they were in at school, they were put off mathematics because they simply didn't get it. But half the challenge of learning mathematics is accepting that you may not be naturally good at it, but if you put the effort in, you can learn it." - Pg. 7

" 'Mathematicians aren't people who find math easy; they're people who enjoy how hard it is.' " - Pg. 7

A fun read from an author that has an amazing enthusiasm for maths and is a great storyteller.

As a connoisseur of fine mistakes, I was happy to find Matt Parker’s book. I knew him from YouTube where he broadcasts the same type of content. He is a mathematics teacher and comedian, and I thought this book was about as good as something like this can be. I can’t tell you too much about it or it would spoil all the great mistakes (although there are a few that you’ve probably heard of), but I was entertained to hear that the German police were searching for a serial killer for years. Her DNA turned up at every crime scene. They eventually learned that the DNA belonged to a woman who worked at the factory that made the cotton swabs they were using.

This book shows readers how math is essential in our day-to-day life. This is a fun book that can get students involved in how it is important to know how to do math correctly. This book can engage students into realizing how fun math can be.

Yippee ki yay number function!

Summary: An exploration of all the ways we use (and misuse) math in the real world, and the ways our calculations can go badly wrong.

Were you among those who wondered how on earth you would ever use that math you learned in high school? The truth is that even if you do not, there are others using that math in just about every aspect of our physical world from our bridges to our medical hardware to our buildings. The amazing thing is how we can describe and predict how things will work through our calculations. And sometimes, if we make a mistake, or a wrong assumption, those calculations can go badly wrong. Some of those mistakes are just amusing or complete nonsense. But some can be deadly…

Matt Parker explores many of the ways math goes wrong in the real world, citing dozens of real world examples for the different classes of math errors he discusses. He starts with how we lose track of time, particularly with our timekeeping rollover features on our computers. Usually, it’s no problem because they start counting each time we turn them on. But leave it running long enough for the time to roll over, and the world can come to a grinding halt, a real problem if it occurs mid-flight.

He discusses engineering problems, like the failure to calculate resonance effects on bridges and engineer to compensate for them. One of the most famous, and tragic, was the collapse of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Walkways when the design of how sections of box beams were supported by nuts was changed without recalculating load limits. Then there are the errors that can creep into spreadsheet formulas and calculations that can produce misleading information on which businesses make decisions.

We often make counting mistakes with intervals. Like how many posts do you need to support a five section fence? (Six). We make geometry mistakes, like the example of the diagram of a soccer ball with all the sections, white and black, being hexagonal. This is not possible on a spherical ball which is why the white sections are hexagons and the black ones are pentagons. Shapes are important. Deformations on rocket boosters combined with cold circular O-rings spelled disaster on a space shuttle. Some are the minor difference in precisely engineered parts that are outside tolerances or times when conventions of measurement vary among those on the same project.

Many of the mistakes concerns the peculiarities of computer calculations, including rounding errors and supposed randomization programs and errors of even a single line of code in an algorithm. Another math problem is what “average” means and what you do with that where most people aren’t “average.” So often, math and computer code are part of complex systems, that when changed, involve recalculating or reviewing every part. Often the things overlooked create problems.

Parker explains all of this in language even this non-mathematician can understand and includes many images and illustrations, making this an enjoyable read (while reminding us the acts of faith involved in everything from spreadsheets to suspension bridges to airplane flights). We assume talented people have made, checked, and rechecked calculations and code for accuracy. And most of the time, things work…except when they don’t.

He also alerts us to fallacies that we may encounter with statistics or so-called random numbers or even in how we count. What seems common sense is not in every case.

There’s one other interesting quirk in this book, and that is in the pagination, which is in reverse order, from 313 to zero, and then a roll over number, 4,294,967,294. I kind of liked it personally. How many times have you wondered, “how many pages left in this book?” In this case, the page number you are on is the answer! This feature may give you a sense of the light touch this author takes in a book dealing with ostensibly serious matters making it such a good read.

Matt Parker matematikával foglalkozó youtube csatornáján szórakoztatóan és nagy lelkesedéssel beszél a matematikáról, ott említette ezt a könyvét is.

A könyv matematikai hibákat mutat be, többnyire olyanokat melyek súlyos tragédiákhoz vezettek. Ennek ellenére igyekszik szórakoztató lenni, bár szerintem a Matt humora itt kevésbé érvényesül, videókban viccesebb. A matekot itt azért elég tágan kell érteni, mérnöki és számítástechnikai hibákról is bőven van itt szó.

A hibák érdekessége azért hullámzó, főleg a sokadik számítástechnikai hibánál éreztem azt, hogy csak ismétli önmagát, itt nyilván nem segít, hogy pont ezzel foglalkozom, így munkaidőben is ilyen hibákat kergetek (és rejtek el a kódban persze).

Bár nem bánom, hogy a könyv vásárlásával támogattam Mattet, azért az az érzésem, a youtube videói sokkal jobbak mint ez a könyv.

True to its name, Humble Pi, is a big helping of humility with a cherry of understanding when it comes to math and programming mistakes.

Despite the title, the book is as much or more about engineering or programming as it is about maths. For me, a lot of the anecdotes didn't really strike the right balance between too much detail and risking boring the reader and enough detail so that the reader understood what should have happened and what went wrong. The main take away for me was that people are inevitably going to make mistakes so systems need to be better designed to catch the mistakes before they turn into disasters.½

I really enjoyed this book, it was funny, interesting and extremely engaging. I hope to read his other one in the future.

Hilarious popular math

Matt Parker gives us a sometimes humorous, a sometimes serious look at how things can and have gone wrong due to math errors. In huge technical projects, with multiple organizations involved, it might be a matter of using the wrong mathematical units, as when a Mars rover crashed onto the surface of the planet. (In 1999, NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched).

Parker also tells of bridge collapses, stock market crises, hospital medication errors, etc., and as serious as these may sound, he is a good story teller, and he makes the stories interesting.

Other examples of errors have occurred in computers because of problems between 32-bit and 64-bit programs. Readers may have heard something about these problems, and Parker tells stories which clarify how, why, and when problems with these systems have occurred.

Some of this may sound dry, but the author doesn't get into the details of the math, just tells interesting and frequently amusing stories of how and why problems have occurred. Reading "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors" brought to mind the admonition of my old math teacher, i.e., always check your work.

The Daily Show for Math. In this hilarious and sometimes tragic book about math in the real world - some instances discussed include the deaths of hundreds of people, but most discussions are of a humorous bent - Parker does a truly phenomenal job of showing just how easy it is to get math wrong, and what can happen in the real world in that situation. From bridge collapses to programming errors to planes running out of fuel midair and all kinds of other situations, Parker truly does an excellent job of looking across the spectrum of math errors and showing both what should have been the correct result and what happened with the wrong one. Truly hilarious, and very much recommended.

It has every type of math in the book which is nice for the classroom because you can pick out sections for your students to read. It also lets students know why math is so important in the world. This book can also be used in any grade higher than 4th because it has a wide range of subjects in it.½

This is a book of when math, programming and engineering mistakes have resulted in errors, from the hilarious to the deadly. Most, if not all, of the cases have been widely known for a long time but for those that haven’t spent the last couple of decades observing interesting failure reports, the book can be a fun companion when you are stuck somewhere and can’t move for a while.

I had hoped for more math errors, but most failures included are programming or engineering mistakes, which by their very nature involve numbers. The classic failures in date management are included, as are the classic unit conversion errors and some classic programming and system administration errors.

There are also a couple of numerical anecdotes that don’t seem like errors at all, such as the observation that the average human does not exist (i.e. humans are so diverse that you can’t find anyone that isn’t outside the 30% span of average in some category).

While I was not completely blown away by this book, I do recommend Matt Parker’s YouTube channel standupmaths. As the channel name implies, Matt Parker do enjoy the occasional punchline, something that can also be observed in the book.

I really like Parker's youtube content, and decided I should support him by buying his book! Unfortunately there is no kindle version available, and shipping of physical books doesn't work during CoVID, so I had to pirate it. Sorry Matt, though if you read this, I'd be more than happy to send you (or a charity) the cash!

Writing about math is a terribly difficult job. The vast majority of the population doesn't give a shit, and the people who do probably already know the things you're going to tell them. We're all starved for good math content! Humble Pi's target audience appears to be "people who liked math in high-school, and haven't touched it since. " It's got enough detail of the math problems to catch your attention, but not enough to actually help you understand what's really happening here. You won't learn any math here, but you'll probably learn about some things to wikipedia later. I liked a lot of the intuitive explanations of some of the described phenomena, but overall felt the book was lacking in substance.

If you follow Parker on youtube, this book doesn't have much to offer you, and his book persona doesn't come off as being as fun as his online one. I'd suggest giving this book a skip, but checking out his videos online instead.

Anche i matematici sbagliano. Io lo so perfettamente. Però sono rimasto comunque stupito dagli esempi riportati in questo libro. Parker, con il suo solito stile scanzonato, racconta di errori di tutti i tipi che hanno avuto conseguenze spesso tragiche. Alcuni mi erano noti, come la sonda che si schiantò su Marte per una confusione tra le misure metriche e quelle imperiali oppure l'esplosione dello Shuttle; altre mi erano del tutto ignote. Ma la parte sicuramente più interessante sono tutte le spiegazioni che affiancano il resoconto di questi errori, e che vi porteranno a imparare un po' di matematica "pratica". Nei due casi che ho citato, per esempio, gli errori tra le misure si sono accumulati man mano che venivano fatte le piccole manovre correttive; e lo Shuttle avrebbe avuto problemi anche senza gli O-ring che si sono spezzati, perché la struttura doveva essere cilindrica ma era verificata in maniera errata. Ma la lezione più importante è quella indicata alla fine del libro. Ci sono casi in cui la matematica deve essere corretta; ma in tanti altri casi sbagliare (e accorgersi di avere sbagliato, mi affretto ad aggiungere) è una fase fondamentale per poter comprendere meglio quello che si sta facendo e arrivare così alla risposta corretta. Ricordatevelo, se siete studenti e avete preso un votaccio!

A brilliant introduction to maths that is simple and fun to read, and participatory enough to fuel an interest in things that can seem foreign. At times it unfortunately falls short, both in the writing, which can become convoluted, and in the concepts, on which I would have enjoyed digging a little deeper within the frame of the book. But overall Parker has written an enjoyable introduction to some complex mathematics that is accessible and interesting.

Being a math-enthusiast, I pick up books about Mathematics more frequently than other subjects. This book contains tales of errors due to (mis)understanding of math. As mentioned by other reviews, the title is misleading - it's not about Pi. Read this book if you're interested in the history of things and their relation to math.

Discussion on leap years was very detailed - we'll be off by a day in 3213 years and we have no plans to fix that - nice way to put it. Penney's game was new to me and I was astounded by how many places Benford's law is currently applied in the real world. I do know the importance of random number, but the author talks about the various ways of creating seeds for the random number sequences.

My husband (who never buys books) bought this for me for some reason. Probably because I engage in schadenfreude and I am not mathematically inclined. However this does do a little more than math, also survivor bias and such.

I love maths. I really do. I am not very good at it which is precisely what I love about it. Its difficulty.

So, I have really enjoyed this book. It is a bit math/programming heavy but interesting enough that if you vaguely understand the maths, it makes for an enjoyable read. All the maths bits are explained so nothing is too far from being understood and appreciated.

The combination of silly but sometimes critical maths errors that happen in the world with the hilarious comedy style (and narration) of Matt Parker and you get the most fun you can extract out of things going wrong.

This book shows everyone what they always asked for, math in real-world situations and why it is so important. It's crazy to realize how much we truly rely on math and that the calculations were accurate. I think this book is great to have students read, some stories might be a bit sad but it might encourage students to pursue their math education a bit more.