Humble Pi Quotes

“There is always the chance that something else is influencing the data, causing the link. Between 1993 and 2008 the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious ‘phantom of Heilbronn’, a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s ‘most dangerous woman’ and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“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.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Because we all make mistakes. Relentlessly. And that is nothing to be feared”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Even after a lifetime of education dealing with small numbers, there is a vestigial instinct that larger numbers are logarithmic; that the gap between a trillion and a billion feels about the same as the jump between a million and a billion—because both are a thousand times bigger. In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and a time when humankind may no longer exist.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“If a new system is implemented, humans can be very resourceful when finding new ways to make mistakes.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“If you ever have access to a friend’s phone, go into the settings and change their calendar to the Buddhist one. Suddenly, they’re living in the 2560s. Maybe try to convince them they have just woken up from a coma.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“In February 2007, six F-22s were flying from Hawaii to Japan when all their systems crashed at once. All navigation systems went offline, the fuel systems went, and even some of the communication systems were out. This was not triggered by an enemy attack or clever sabotage. The aircraft had merely flown over the International Date Line.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Mathematicians aren’t people who find math easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“Even when we cannot see parts of the moon, they are still physically there. During a new moon, when it is completely lit from behind, it appears only as a black, starless circle in the sky. For while we sometimes cannot see the moon, it is still there as a silhouette. Which is why I get upset when a crescent moon is shown with stars visible through the middle of it!”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“In the mid-1990s, a new employee of Sun Microsystems in California kept disappearing from their database. Every time his details were entered, the system seemed to eat him whole; he would disappear without a trace. No one in HR could work out why poor Steve Null was database kryptonite. The staff in HR were entering the surname as “Null,” but they were blissfully unaware that, in a database, NULL represents a lack of data, so Steve became a non-entry. To computers, his name was Steve Zero or Steve McDoesNotExist. Apparently, it took a while to work out what was going on, as HR would happily reenter his details each time the issue was raised, never stopping to consider why the database was routinely removing him.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I have no idea how stock traders respond to such an unexpected jump up; like some kind of anti-crash. I assume they jumped back in through windows and blew cocaine out of their noses.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“A laser ready to shoot financial data between cities. It holds the world record for the most boring laser ever.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I love the example of someone who starts work at 8 a.m. and by 12 p.m. they need to have cleaned floors eight to twelve of a building. Setting about cleaning one floor per hour would leave a whole floor still untouched come noon.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Allowing for the two types of year (leap and normal), and the seven possible days a year can start on, there are only fourteen calendars to choose from. When I was shopping for a 2019 calendar (non–leap year, starting on a Tuesday), I knew it would be the same as the one for 2013, so I could pick up a secondhand one at a discount price. Actually, for some retro charm, I hunted down one from 1985.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“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. And people wonder why the metric system was invented.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“there is any moral to this story, it’s that, when you are writing code, remember that someone may have to comb through it and check everything when it is being repurposed in the future. It could even be you, long after you have forgotten the original logic behind the code. 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.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I spoke off the record to a database consultant who was working with a company in Italy. They had a lot of clients, and their database would generate a client ID for each one by using something like the current year, the first letter of the client company name and then an index number to make sure each ID was unique. For some reason their database was losing companies whose names started with the letter E. It was because they were using Excel and it was converting those client IDs to be a scientific notation number, which was no longer recognized as an ID.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“I would be happier if we called them “phone digits” instead of “phone numbers,” because, I repeat, I don’t think they are numbers. If you’re ever not sure if something is a number or not, my test is to imagine asking someone for half of it. If you asked for half the height of someone 180 centimeters tall, they would say 90 centimeters. Height is a number. Ask for half of someone’s phone number, and they will give you the first half of the digits. If the response is not to divide it but rather to split it, it’s not a number.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“a perfect stance, which is wrong yet supported by enough plausible misconceptions that it is possible to argue about it at length”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Imagine the slices of cheese are horizontal and mistakes are raining down from the top. Only mistakes which fall down through holes in every layer make it out the bottom to become accidents. The new element is that the cheese slices themselves are hot and parts of them are liable to drip down, causing new problems.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“So the signs remain incorrect. But at least now I have a framed letter from the UK government saying that they don’t think accurate math is important and they don’t believe street signs should have to follow the laws of geometry.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“The sixty-story John Hancock Tower was built in Boston in the 1970s, and it was discovered to have an unexpected torsional instability. The interplay of the wind between the surrounding buildings and the tower itself was causing it to twist. Despite being designed in line with current building codes, torsional instability found a way to twist the building, and people on the top floors started feeling seasick. Once again, it was tuned mass dampers to the rescue! Lumps of lead weighing 330 tons were put in vats of oil on opposite ends of the fifty-eighth floor. Attached to the building by springs, the lead weights damp any twisting motion and keep the movement below noticeable levels.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“People stepping up and down should not be a problem, and even the 1-Hertz sideways back-and-forth movement of humans walking should not have been a problem, as everyone is likely to be stepping at different times. For anyone pushing with their right foot, another person would be pushing with their left, and all the forces would pretty much cancel each other out. This sideways resonance would only be a problem if enough people walked perfectly in step. This is the “synchronous” in “synchronous lateral excitation” from pedestrians. On the Millennium Bridge, people did start to walk in step, because the movement of the bridge affected the rhythm at which they were walking. This formed a feedback loop: people stepping in sync caused the bridge to move more, and the bridge moving caused more people to step in sync.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“A crude analogy for resonance is that of a pendulum, often modeled as a child in a swing. If you are charged with pushing the child and you just thrust your arms out at random intervals, you will not do very well: you’d hit the child coming toward you and slow the swing down as often as you’d give the swing a push as it’s going away and speed it up. Even a regular pushing rate that did not match the movement of the swing would leave you pushing empty air most of the time. Only if you push exactly at the rate that matches when the child is directly in front of you and starting their descent will you achieve success. When the timing of your effort matches the frequency the swing is moving at, each push adds a little more energy into the system.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“The exterior of the building was designed by architect Rafael Viñoly to have a sweeping curve, but this meant that all the reflective glass windows accidentally became a massive concave mirror—a kind of giant lens in the sky able to focus sunlight on a tiny area. It’s not often sunny in London, but when a sun-filled day in summer 2013 lined up with the recently completed windows, a death heat-ray swept across London. OK, it wasn’t that bad. But it was producing temperatures of nearly 200°F”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“People who do admit making errors are at best suspended or moved on, thus leaving behind a team who ‘do not make errors’ and have no experience of error management. – H. Thimbleby, ‘Errors + Bugs Needn’t Mean Death’, Public Service Review: UK Science & Technology, 2, pp. 18–19, 2011”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“living in cities was one of the things which caused humans to rely on maths. But which part of city living is recorded in our longest-surviving mathematical documents? Brewing beer. Beer gave us some of humankind’s first calculations.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Even when the data has made it into a database, it is not safe... which brings us, finally, to Microsoft Excel.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors