I can see why, for political reasons, the figure of 51,999 was used – to draw attention to the single expected death from solar-panel production and so to emphasize how safe it is. The problem was that the starting value of 52,000 was a rounded figure with only two significant figures and now, suddenly, it had five. Pero me encantaron los capítulos de ingeniería, geometría, probabilidad, aleatoriedad, estadística, sesgos etcétera. Also, it's numbered backwards, which made it tricky to track my process through it here, since Goodreads won't let you update to Page 141 when you started on Page 316. Obviously, we should do whatever we can to avoid engineering mistakes, but when engineers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible, occasionally a new aspect of mathematical behaviour will unexpectedly emerge.

A building rock when its resonant frequency matches a gym class leaping to Snap's 1990 hit I've Got The Power? I'm one of those people who got labelled "bad at math" at a young age because I struggled with arithmetic (and still do). The metaphor he uses at the end of this is hot Swiss cheese, but I preferred the straight Swiss cheese one used earlier – that is, there are always holes, you need to make sure that the holes in your defences don't all line up.

Parker over-reaches a bit in this section when he describes the cockpits of WW II aircraft as roomy. There are bountiful opportunities for him to narrate very large and tiny numbers without using scientific notation, and I personally found this fun. He put forward the Swiss Cheese model of disasters, which looks at the whole system, instead of focusing on individual people. You can get upset about these things, but 2-d representations of 3-d phenomena are, well, you know, 2-d.

His writing is infused with a dry wit and a good sprinkling of genuine laugh-out-loud humour, which hopefully would make this a fun read ever for those who aren't already invested in the maths stories. The only thing I did find - and this is the only reason the book doesn't get five stars - is that the final couple of chapters seemed a little samey. We know a million, a billion and a trillion are different sizes, but we often don’t appreciate the staggering increases between them. The pragmatic approach is to acknowledge this and build a system robust enough to filter mistakes out before they become disasters.

He just really loves anything even tangentially mathematical, and loves sharing it with everyone else.

As each chapter is independent of others it’s easy to dip in and out of the book when one fancies light relief from the more serious business of reading fiction! Supongo que ha querido dirigir su producto hacia un público más versado en el tema, y es comprensible. The book is never overly technical--just enough mathematics or engineering background is introduced, to allow an understanding of each episode in the book. bestseller," stand-up mathematician Matt Parker unveils the hilarious results of maths going wrong in the real world. It is my uninformed impression that in some industries, such as medicine and finance, which do tend to blame the individual, ignoring the whole system can lead to a culture of not admitting mistakes when they happen.One of the things that always annoys me is that so many people seem to understand some things about sport that they never seem to connect with intellectual effort.