Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

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This entertaining tour of real-world mathematical disasters reveals the importance of math in our everyday lives.

Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes…until it doesn’t. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences.

Humble Pi is the book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?” Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean.

Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.