Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

**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 dollarsmysteriously vanish into thin air? A building rock when its resonantfrequency 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.

AsMatt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: computerprogrammes, finance, engineering. And most of the time this maths worksquietly behind the scenes, until ... it doesn't. Exploring andexplaining a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving theinternet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman empireand a hapless Olympic shooting team, Matt Parker shows us the bizarreways maths trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential placein our world.

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