Humble Pi

    Recently, I wrote about SuperFreakonomics, the disappointing follow up to the much enjoyed (by me) original Freakonomics. Now, I have found a worthy successor, with a small caveat. It's a mathematician's take on numbers and how they affect the world, rather than an economist's interpretation of incentives. If you are the type of reader who involuntarily shudders at the words binary permutation, or resonance, this book is not for you. If not, I recommend finding Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World by Matt Parker as soon as you finish reading this review.

    Excellent writing and a great sense of humor greatly contribute to the analysis of bad math and its effects on the world. Much like Freakonomics, it reads amazingly easily for a nonfiction work. However, content wise, it might be closer to Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. When discussing how issues in math affect the world, Parker takes care to break down the chain of events leading to the failures. It's amazing to consider how small errors snowball and lead to catastrophic events in a variety of life's aspects. Everything is mentioned - from trying to design an accurate calendar, to rollover errors in computers leading to radiation poisoning, to a US Navy ship becoming unresponsive because its computer could not handle a divide by zero error. Overall, I easily recommend Humble Pi. Also, I listened to the audiobook version, and attest to great narration.

    Funny story connected to this book: I was walking to class, listening to the portion about the Challenger disaster aftermath. In it, the question of the shuttle's SRBs, which are thin-walled pressure vessels and thus easily deformed, arises. Specifically, the focus was on the difficulties associated in verifying that it is a perfect cylinder. Twenty minutes later, the topic of verifying whether or not a rocket is perfectly cylindrical came up during a conversation about 3D Digital Image Correlation. And no, we didn't get there via the Challenger. Or even SRBs. Textile composite shear modulus measurement was the topic at hand. Good thing Humble Pi also has a section discussing probabilities and coincidences...