Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors - Kindle Edition

**The First Ever Maths Book to be a No.1 Bestseller**

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.

What happens when maths goes wrong in the real world?
From architecture and computer programming to finance and engineering, our world is built on mathematics – but it’s only when something goes wrong that we realise how reliant we are on maths working smoothly in the background.

Humble Pi is a collection of Matt Parker's favourite mathematical mistakes of all time. Some of these involve bridges that wobble when they’re not meant to. Or billions of dollars disappearing into thin air. Or, everyone's worst nightmare, power failure on a passenger jet.

'A fascinating and deeply surprising journey into the hilarious and sometimes tragic realms of mathematical error. Brilliant' Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and Messy

'If you have waltzed through life without ever considering the daily consequences of fixed-length binary numbers, dividing by zero or rounding errors, strap in and prepare to be both horrified and fascinated' Helen Czerski, author of Storm in a Teacup