Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

by Matt Parker

A million seconds from now is just shy of eleven days and fourteen hours. Not so bad. I could wait that long. It’s within two weeks. A billion seconds is over thirty-one years. A trillion seconds from now is after the year 33,700 CE.

Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly.

As this decision could either lengthen their year of ruling or shorten that of an opponent, the motivation was not always to keep the calendar aligned.

A political committee is rarely a good solution to a mathematical problem.

The Julian calendar is too short compared to the orbit. But it is too long compared to the seasons. Bizarrely, the seasons don’t even exactly match the orbital year.

But astronomy does give Julius Caesar the last laugh. The unit of a light-year, that is, the distance traveled by light in a year (in a vacuum) is specified using the Julian year of 365.25 days. So we measure our current cosmos using a unit in part defined by an ancient Roman.

At 3:14 a.m. on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, many of our modern microprocessors and computers are going to stop working.

This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, as we always have done.

I’ve just opened my most recent such database and scrolled to the top. The first entry is from a Ms. Teacher who works at Test High School on Test Road in the county of Fakenham.

But if you are a parent, please don’t give your child a first name that will set them up for a lifetime of battling computers.

And given that over three hundred children in the USA since 1990 have been named Abcde, it’s worth spelling this out: don’t name your child anything like Fake, Null,

In normal computer programming, you can easily leave a spare bracket somewhere or miss putting in a comma. Which leaves you swearing loudly at a semicolon at 3 a.m. (“What the heck are you doing there?”), or so I’ve heard.

I was invited on to different sports-based programs, where I spent a lot of time saying things like, “A pentagon has five sides, but if you look at the signs, all of the shapes are hexagons, with six sides.” I was basically making the argument that five is a different number than six.

There have been plenty of times when a hardware issue has been covered by a software fix, but only in Switzerland have I seen a bug fixed with a bureaucracy patch.

Computers just blindly follow the rules they are given and do the logical thing, with no regard for what may be the reasonable thing.

If you want something unlikely to occur, you simply need the patience to create enough opportunities to allow it to happen.

Or, in my case, patience, a coin, a lot of free time, and the kind of obsessive personality that keeps you sitting in a room flipping a coin by yourself, despite the desperate pleas of your friends and family to stop.

It seems the first human whose name has been passed down through millennia of history was not a ruler, a warrior, or a priest . . . but an accountant.

A laser ready to shoot financial data between cities. It holds the world record for the most boring laser ever.

And I’d like to make it clear I’m not just trying to get the phrase “functional sausage” into this book to win a bet.

It seems the clocks going forward and depriving people of sleep did cause extra heart attacks, but only in people who would have had a heart attack at some point anyway. The heart attack merely happened sooner.

In the apothecaries’ system of weight units, a pound is divided into 12 ounces, which each consist of 8 drams. A dram is then 3 scruples, each made from 20 grains. I hope that made sense. A grain is one 5,760th of a pound. But not a normal pound: this is a troy pound. Which is different from a normal pound.

As the saying goes, there are only three things certain in life: death, taxes, and people trying to cheat on their taxes.

My favorite is an ensemble of tests called the diehard package. Sadly, this does not involve throwing the numbers off the Nakatomi Tower or making them crawl through an air vent.

During this translational work, the SRI would be converting all sorts of data between different formats, which is the natural habitat of computerized math errors.

For this reason, programmers can leave “comments” in their code, which are little messages to anyone else who has to read their code. The programmer mantra should be “Always comment on your code.” And make the comments helpful. I’ve reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is “Good luck, future Matt.”

“Mathematicians aren’t people who find math easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”