Humble Pi - Matt Parker

**The First Ever Maths Book to be a No.1 Bestseller**
'Wonderful ... superb' Daily Mail

What makes a bridge wobble when it's not meant to? Billions of dollars
mysteriously vanish into thin air? A building rock when its resonant
frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world.

As
Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computer
programmes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths works
quietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring and
explaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the
internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empire
and a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre
ways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place
in our world.

Mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills', but
we would all be better off, he argues, if we saw it as a practical
ally. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, we can learn from
its pitfalls. It also contains puzzles, challenges, geometric socks,
jokes about binary code and three deliberate mistakes. Getting it wrong
has never been more fun.