HUMBLE PI: WHEN MATH GOES WRONG IN THE REAL WORLD

This entertaining tour of real-world mathematical disasters reveals the importance of math in our everyday lives An international bestseller Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn't. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences. Humble Pi is the book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, "When am I ever going to use this in the real world?" Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, M...