A review by 10_4tina
Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

funny informative lighthearted fast-paced

4.25

Mathy. Funny. Fascinating.

I love these kind of anecdotes that are interesting and funny and teach you something all at once. I learned a lot, totally changed my views on excel, and fell in love with math all over again.

Here are some of the interesting tidbits:

chapter 0:
-middle in respect to multiplication vs addition (middle of 1-10 is 3 due to logarithmic mental jumps in respect to multiplication)

chapter 1:
-October 4, 1582 was directly followed by the 15th of October in catholic countries based on a decree from the pope

chapter 3:
-the test for identifying a number - imagine asking someone for half of it - (height is a number - phone number is not a number - if the response is not to divide it, but rather to split it, it's not a number)

chapter 4:
-football (soccer) socks - simultaneously right and wrong
-3 cogs stuck together 

chapter 6:
-a bug fixed with a bureaucracy patch - 256 axels on trains are not aloud due to a coding problem - rewriting the manual was easier than fixing a bug in coding

chapter 11:
-a mathematical certainty: you can find any pattern you want as long as you are prepared to ignore enough data that does not match