Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

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Whenever a computer cannot decipher a location, it still has to fill something in, and so 0,0 became the default location.

I know it’ll be a matter of a reader’s interests but about half of the book covered topics I regarded as dull, so you’ll need to work to find the ones that interest you. I don’t go for popular science of this type, anecdotal though informed, commentary on technical mistakes.One in a million people will unknowingly live exactly a whole number of kilometres (door to door) from work, accurate to the nearest millimetre. Misplaced decimals, misunderstood calculator quirks, bridges and buildings that resonate at unfortunate frequencies, and everyday folk who lack the understanding of how to divide numbers with units, make up many of the fascinating anecdotes in this book.

There's also a trick to the index that I didn't figure out (but the index is worth reading for itself, as well). But to my eye it looks like two numbers of different sizes have been combined and have produced an unnecessary level of precision as a result. I'm one of those people who got labelled "bad at math" at a young age because I struggled with arithmetic (and still do).Rather than save the best to last, Parker resorts to revisiting rather familiar feeling computer problems, which are interesting (but perhaps more to me, with a background in computing, than many readers), but by now not quite as original and fresh feeling.