In our story #40, we look at “Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors” written by the #standup #mathematician Matt Parker where he examines a bewildering array of math mishaps with a light touch and dry wit.
The book involves the Snap song “The Power”. A 39-storey building in South Korea was evacuated because an exercise class working out to that song on the 12th floor matched the resonant frequency of the building, causing it to sway (mimicking an earthquake). Seems far-fetched, but it’s not – it’s #maths.
You might think you have a phone number, but you don’t really. It’s not a number: you’re not going to perform any mathematical operations on it, and if it starts with a zero then things will go wrong if you do what you would normally do with a number that starts with zero, ie omit it. For this reason, as the standup mathematician Matt explains with amusing pedantry, he would really rather we call them “phone digits”.
Tangentially mathematical errors are related to the unwanted interpretation that is made by Excel of what you type: the leading zeros of telephone numbers are removed when inserted as a number. Oops, not to rely too much on excel here, isn't it?
Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges.
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!
Read #HumblePi. You’ll learn some stuff. You’ll occasionally laugh. You’ll be forced to acknowledge you’re misusing #Excel…even if you refuse to do anything about it :P
Sources:
<1> Humble Pi by Matt Parker review – a comedy of maths errors by The Guardian.
<2> Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors review by Goodreads.
<3> Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Jennifer Newton for Chemistry World.
<4> Google images.
#pi #comedy #math #mathstories #mathseries #story40
The book involves the Snap song “The Power”. A 39-storey building in South Korea was evacuated because an exercise class working out to that song on the 12th floor matched the resonant frequency of the building, causing it to sway (mimicking an earthquake). Seems far-fetched, but it’s not – it’s #maths.
You might think you have a phone number, but you don’t really. It’s not a number: you’re not going to perform any mathematical operations on it, and if it starts with a zero then things will go wrong if you do what you would normally do with a number that starts with zero, ie omit it. For this reason, as the standup mathematician Matt explains with amusing pedantry, he would really rather we call them “phone digits”.
Tangentially mathematical errors are related to the unwanted interpretation that is made by Excel of what you type: the leading zeros of telephone numbers are removed when inserted as a number. Oops, not to rely too much on excel here, isn't it?
Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges.
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!
Read #HumblePi. You’ll learn some stuff. You’ll occasionally laugh. You’ll be forced to acknowledge you’re misusing #Excel…even if you refuse to do anything about it :P
Sources:
<1> Humble Pi by Matt Parker review – a comedy of maths errors by The Guardian.
<2> Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors review by Goodreads.
<3> Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Jennifer Newton for Chemistry World.
<4> Google images.
#pi #comedy #math #mathstories #mathseries #story40
