Every year when my father would call his brother for either of their birthdays, the two would discuss what turning a certain age actually meant. By turning 40, has one completed their 40th journey around the sun, or is one working towards it. They could not agree on how the counting actually works, failing to consider that you are, in a respect, meant to count starting from 0 and not from 1.
Sure, it might be silly to imagine two grown men arguing about what seems like basic maths, but this is apparently a common enough of an error for Matt Parker to include in this book on maths. While math is a secondary modeling system like languages are, humans do not seem to have an inherent instinct for math. This is despite the fact that everyone thinks that math is straight forward and logical.
Books like this stand to disprove the notion. We get it wrong often, and with the right point of view it can be pretty damn funny. This does depend on your sense of humor. The book’s author, Matt Parker, petitioned the UK government to update certain of their traffic signs, which featured a geometrically incorrect football. What can I say, I find certain academically minded pedantry to be very funny. Also funny was how in an attempt to make a uniform for the average service member, the US military got the dimensions of all their service members and created a uniform that doesn’t fit any of them, because the ‘average person’ is a bit of a fictitious concept. Germany and Switzerland, two countries falsely known for their precision, attempted to erect a bridge and found that it was off by 57 centimeters because they used different measures of sea level, although this resonated with me only as a southern European who has been victim to a lot of northern European chauvinism.
Most people can agree that the world we enjoy is built on the unseen labor of others. Less obvious is the fact that the world is built on the unseen mistakes of others, as those mistakes tend to have been swept under the rug. For me this book was an enjoyable reminder of that fact.
Parker has other books, and I think I will pick them up at some point.
