The first entry is from a Ms Teacher who works at Test High School on Test Road in the county of Fakenham. The book covers a range of mistakes, including bridge failures, space exploration disasters, game show cheats, financial algorithms gone rogue, and so much more. Matt Parker is a former maths teacher who communicates about mathematics via YouTube videos, stand-up comedy, and books.

Simply telling people not to make any mistakes is a naive way to try to avoid accidents and disasters.But for all the chuckles we can derive from laughing at silly mistakes, Matt Parker shows the rampant fallibility in our application of maths, hounding the gambler to the government official to the bridge engineer and certainly to us. To avoid being deleted as unwanted test data, when Brian Test started a new job, he brought in a cake for all his new colleagues to enjoy. The main characters altered the computer code at a company so that, whenever interest was being calculated, instead of being rounded to the nearest penny the value would be truncated and the remaining fractions of a penny deposited into their account.

Two programmers in a New York firm increased the tax withheld on all company pay cheques by two cents each week but sent the money to their own tax-withholding accounts so they received it all as a tax refund at the end of the year. If I was to wear a ‘I’m too intelligent to play football’ t-shirt, I would, rightly enough, I guess, be considered grossly insulting.In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was nicknamed Galloping Gertie and it collapsed four months after being built. Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations--that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes. There are bountiful opportunities for him to narrate very large and tiny numbers without using scientific notation, and I personally found this fun. You can get upset about these things, but 2-d representations of 3-d phenomena are, well, you know, 2-d.

The book is never overly technical--just enough mathematics or engineering background is introduced, to allow an understanding of each episode in the book. During the investigation, about twenty people were crammed back into that room to recreate the exercise class and, sure enough, they did have the power. When it was reopened, the Millennium Bridge was described as ‘probably the most complex passively-damped structure in the world’.There's also a trick to the index that I didn't figure out (but the index is worth reading for itself, as well). Yeah, he probably ought to have just given up, he clearly didn’t have any natural talent for that shit.

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. For the average folk, we never fully manage to put a finger on the utility of an integral or the need to prove that an isosceles triangle has two same sides (can’t I just believe it, 8th grade Geometry teacher! When the exercise class on the twelfth floor had ‘The Power’, the thirty-eighth floor started shaking around ten times more than it normally did. Of course there are the big stories, from NASA disasters to the risks of trying to crash onboard systems on planes mid-flight. An emergency landing at an abandoned airstrip without engines or power or electricity for the landing gear -- surprised a drag racing party!

I don’t go for popular science of this type, anecdotal though informed, commentary on technical mistakes. 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. In many of the stories here you might find yourself feeling rather smug – but as they say in the classics, ‘pride comes before a fall’ and ‘there but for the grace of God go I…’ It is really worth while keeping those little quotes in mind here.