Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

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To avoid being deleted as unwanted test data, when Brian Test started a new job, he brought in a cake for all his new colleagues to enjoy. But if you’re reading it three years after it was published, that does not mean that the universe is now 13,800,000,003 years old.

A little larger or heavier construct suddenly passes a limit where previously minor problems become major ones or add up in odd ways. The first entry is from a Ms Teacher who works at Test High School on Test Road in the county of Fakenham. The Null problem can be fixed by encoding names in a format for only character data, so that it doesn’t get confused with the data value of NULL. The metaphor he uses at the end of this is hot Swiss cheese, but I preferred the straight Swiss cheese one used earlier – that is, there are always holes, you need to make sure that the holes in your defences don't all line up.In the mid-1990s a new employee of Sun Microsystems in California kept disappearing from their database. In many of the stories here you might find yourself feeling rather smug – but as they say in the classics, ‘pride comes before a fall’ and ‘there but for the grace of God go I…’ It is really worth while keeping those little quotes in mind here. But for all the chuckles we can derive from laughing at silly mistakes, Matt Parker shows the rampant fallibility in our application of maths, hounding the gambler to the government official to the bridge engineer and certainly to us. His name is Rich, by the way, just in case this book is one of the few objects to survive the apocalypse and he becomes the new oldest-named human.

También se me ha escapado parte de su contenido “humorístico”, pero creo que es achacable a que el autor y yo hablamos distintos idiomas (tanto literarios como mentales). With his delightful conversational style, honed in his stand-up maths shows, it feels as if Parker is a friend down the pub, relating the story of some technical disaster driven by maths and computing, or regaling us with a numerical cock-up. The next shock is that a lot of the diagrams supposed to be showing a team working like a well-oiled machine use a mechanism which would be permanently seized in place. After the official investigation had ruled out an earthquake, they found the culprit was an exercise class on the twelfth floor. When it was reopened, the Millennium Bridge was described as ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’.

A parked car was a bit melted and someone claimed it burned their lemon (that’s not cockney rhyming slang; it was an actual lemon). 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.

However, this is an excellent read, managing to be light and meaty at the same time, and highly recommended for anyone interested in maths, business or computing. In Los Angeles there is a block of land on the corner of West 1st Street and South Spring Street which houses the offices of the LA Times.Parker takes us through some of his favourite, or some of the more noteworthy, cases of maths going wrong across a variety of applications. Las bromas de uno y de otro rebotaban en alguna especie de muro invisible, y al final cada uno acababa riéndose de sus propios chistes, sin pillar los del otro.