Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors Audiobook (Free)

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Humble Pi written and read by Matt Parker.

What makes a bridge wobble when it’s not meant to? Vast amounts of dollars mysteriously vanish into nothing? A building rock when its resonant rate of recurrence matches a gym class leaping to Snap’s 1990 strike I’ve Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what goes on when maths goes wrong in the real world.

As Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are designed on maths: pc programmes, financing, about Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Mistakes engineering. And most of the time this maths functions quietly behind the moments, until … it generally does not. Exploring and detailing a litany of glitches, near-misses and mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street indicators, lotteries, the Roman empire and a hapless Olympic capturing group, Matt Parker shows us the bizarre ways maths vacations us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world.

Mathematics doesn’t have good ‘people abilities’, 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 incorrect has never been more pleasurable.