Humble Pi

Beschrijving

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 succesnummer I’ve Got The Power? The answer is maths. Or, to be precise, what happens when maths goes wrong te the real world.

Spil Matt Parker shows us, our modern lives are built on maths: rekentuig 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 gegevens, 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 te our world.

Mathematics doesn’t have good ‘people skills’, but wij would all be better off, he argues, if wij saw it spil a practical ally. This book shows how, by making maths our friend, wij 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 bot more fun.

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