Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

"Matt is a stand-up comedian and he’s a very funny guy. He makes mathematics interesting by making it funny. In this book, he pokes fun at people who’ve made silly mathematical mistakes, but at the same time he also looks at some issues that are quite serious: bridges collapsing and killing people, for example. He can do the somber, serious stuff as well. It’s a great book. As far as I know, it’s the first math book that’s ever been a number one bestseller. Out of the five books, it’s probably the most similar to mine in that it looks at real stories and moves around different application areas to illustrate different mathematical ideas. There is an aspect of learning from the mistakes and there’s a nice example he gives about aviation engineering where lots of mistakes combined to cause a disaster. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He talks about the Swiss cheese model: this idea that for a catastrophe to occur in aviation, it should be like dropping a ball down lots of stacked layers of Swiss cheese. It might get through the first hole and maybe even the second, but it will hopefully get stopped at one of the layers lower down. The more layers of safety checks you have, the less likely it is that a catastrophic disaster will occur. But sometimes, all these holes seem to line up for some reason, and then you get a disaster. He doesn’t try to provide the tips and tricks that I’ve put in The Maths of Life and Death , but he certainly looks at lots of real world areas and tells lots of interesting and funny stories. Yes, he had this campaign and a petition to Parliament and it got more than 20,000 signatures. He’s very funny when he’s doing it. He knows what will tickle people and what will engage them. It’s a great way to get people thinking about math, and it’s great that you think about that when you drive past the football signs now. As do I—I saw some much more realistic football signs signs when I was in Italy on holiday, so I took a photo of them. He does lots of little campaigns about math in the real world. He has a big YouTube channel, so he publishes some great stuff there as well. He’s absolutely right about that. Sometimes when you’re doing formal mathematics, you just have to give up your intuition. It’s almost like walking on a tightrope. You’ve got to give up your safety net, what you think should be the case, and just follow the rules that you’ve been taught in mathematics to try and build a bridge, to get over the chasm. I think often, our intuition—especially in areas like probability—is absolutely horrible. “Sometimes you have to just let go of your preconceptions and follow the rules of mathematics” For example, we’re not good at understanding randomness. Matt gives this nice example from when he was a teacher. One homework he used to set was for kids to go away and toss a coin 100 times. And he could easily tell which kids had actually tossed the coin and which kids had just made it up, because achieving five heads or five tails in a row is actually really likely if you toss a coin. But no one who’s just making it up will put five heads or five tails in a row, because it just doesn’t seem random enough. It’s the same in the lottery. People tend to veer away from putting two consecutive numbers because they think that’s not random and that randomness means being well spaced. But in half of all lottery draws, two consecutive numbers come up. Randomness is not about being well-spaced; clusters appear in random distributions all the time. Sometimes you have to just let go of your preconceptions and follow the rules of mathematics, which is why learning math can be quite difficult. Not anymore, but he still does a lot of stuff with schools. He has a company called Think Maths and they get people to do talks in schools. He’s really keen to educate people about math. He’s really one of the good guys."