Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

by Matt Parker

In 1907 a combination road-and-railway steel bridge was being built across a section of the St Lawrence River in Canada, which was over half a kilometre wide. Construction had been going on for some time but on 29 August one of the workers noticed that a rivet he had put in place about an hour earlier had mysteriously snapped in half. Then, suddenly, the whole south section of the bridge collapsed, with a noise that was heard up to 10 kilometres away. Of the eighty-six people working on the bridge at the time, seventy-five died. There had been a miscalculation as to how heavy the bridge would be, partly because, when the bridge design was increased from 1,600 feet to 1,800 feet, the forces had not been recalculated, so the lower support beams buckled and eventually failed completely.