Humble Pi
When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

Humble Pi takes us on a tour of the times when math, engineering, and programming have gone wrong, leading to disastrous or sometimes just funny results. The book covers a range of mistakes, including bridge failures, space exploration disasters, game show cheats, financial algorithms gone rogue, an......more

Turns out that pi's not as humble as one could imagine. That many people actually did die as a result of many of the errors is tragic and definitely takes most of fun from the comedy. The unfortunate book name aside, it's a magnificent read into how maths go bump in everywhere. Q: ‘Plaintiff’s insiste......more

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors started off with a bang for me. Autor, Matt Parker, intentionally put the pages in reverse order, so that as you read the book, the page number decreases rather than increases. The first story is about the Pepsi points contest where you could win a Harrier (milita......more

Summary: not very interesting, and it's not about maths errors. This book is a collection of anecdotes that you can read anywhere: most of them I had read before, and you can find them on the internet, too. They're bundled by theme here, which is convenient, but the writer tries too hard to make them......more

This is a marvelous book about all the ways that math errors can infiltrate our day-to-day living. Some of the math errors are just fun (as in older arcade games), while others have life-or-death consequences (like airplanes running out of fuel mid-flight). Some of the math errors are simply a confus......more