Humble Pi: A Comedy Of Maths Errors Quotes
"A mathematical mistake was about to threaten the lives of tens of thousands of people onboard."
"Eight hundred aircraft travelling through one of the world’s biggest cities were put at risk because, essentially, someone didn’t choose a big enough number."
"The software counter internal to the generator control units (GCUs) will overflow after 248 days of continuous power, causing that GCU to go into failsafe mode."
"Most humans never need to go near the actual circuits or binary code on which computers are built."
"A mathematical error... was that nobody had checked how many milliseconds there would be in the probable run-time of the system."
"In less than four hundred years, within the lifespan of a civilization, the seasons would drift by three months."
"Leap years were all the years divisible by four, and all Luigi suggested was to remove the leap days from years which were also a multiple of 100."
"The calendar year moves a quarter of a day away from the seasons. After four years, summer would start a day later."
"The universe has given us only two units of time: the year and the day."
"As well as the Earth’s axis of rotation moving about, the orbital path of the Earth moves around as well."
"The Millennium Bridge had been accidentally tuned to around 1 Hertz."
"If you start the stopwatch and then change the time backwards, the time elapsed on the stopwatch will suddenly jump forward."
"The walkway had two levels... the design called for long, slender metal rods to be attached from above, and for both levels of the walkway to be suspended from them."
"In the original design, each nut had to support the walkway directly above it and any people on that walkway."
"The Millennium Bridge's sideways movement had a damping ratio of below 1 per cent for resonant frequencies below 1.5 Hertz."
"As soon as the computer cannot decipher a location, it still has to fill something in, and so 0,0 became the default location."
"A friend of mine worked on a database for a large financial company in the UK, and it would only allow names with three or more letters."
"Modern employee databases can go wrong during searches because they check search_term != NULL before proceeding."
"Once the walkway had been fixed, it was a well-investigated area."
"To this day, there is a sign on the Albert Bridge in London warning troops not to march in time across it."
"Excel does have one good layer of mistake prevention when someone is typing in a formula: it checks that all the syntax is correct."
"But Excel cannot make sure that you use sensible functions or point them at the correct cells to feed the right data into the formulas."
"Hermans found that 2,205 spreadsheets had one or more Excel error messages."
"This can lead to real problems. In 2012 the State Office of Education in Utah miscalculated its budget to the tune of $25 million because of what State Superintendent Larry Shumway called ‘a faulty reference’ in a spreadsheet."
"One Enron spreadsheet had a chain of 1,205 cells that fed directly from one to the next."
"In 2011 Kern County in California forgot to ask a company for $12 million tax because they used the wrong version of a spreadsheet."
"In 2012 JPMorgan Chase lost a bunch of money; it’s difficult to get a hard figure, but the agreement seems to be that it was around $6 billion."
"Amazingly, one specific Value at Risk calculation was being done in a series of Excel spreadsheets with values having to be manually copied between them."
"The geometry of the football on UK street signs is wrong."
"Eventually, the UK government agreed that I’m not funny and allowed the petition."
"In 1980 the Texaco oil company was doing some exploratory oil drilling in Lake Peigneur, Louisiana."
"The drill hole was only about 36 centimetres across, but that was enough for water to flow from Lake Peigneur down into the salt mines."
"The moon may be a sphere but, from where we’re standing, it looks like a circle."
"Even when we cannot see parts of the moon, they are still physically there."
"I love spotting people who have bought a big lock, only to leave the screws holding it in place exposed."
"Many lives have been saved or lost as a consequence of the simple geometry of which way a door should open."
"When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven people onboard, a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster."
"As an ex-high-school teacher, I have a framed poster in my office claiming that ‘Education works best when all the parts are working’."
"In 1998, in the lead-up to the millennium, a new £2 coin was released in the UK."
"On the discussion board of Bodybuilding.com someone with the username m1ndless asked how many times a week it was safe to do a full-body workout."
"The advertisers said they were aware that some people might consider a double cheeseburger and milkshake to be the same permutation as a milkshake and double cheeseburger."
"Gandhi is famous as a pacifist who led India to independence from the UK."
"Trains in Switzerland are not allowed to have 256 axles."
"On 25 February 1991, in the First Gulf War a Scud missile was fired at US army barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia."
"But, as always, some calculators slip through the gaps. And not just calculators: US Navy warships can get division by zero wrong too."
"It took a supergroup of maths mistakes, led by division by zero, to take down a whole warship."
"If you want something unlikely to occur, you simply need the patience to create enough opportunities to allow it to happen."
"The odds of any one couple being photographed together by chance in their youth is incredibly small. But it’s not zero."
"We would not care about Donna and Alex if this coincidence had not happened. They are two arbitrary people living in North America."
"The only legitimate mathematical strategy you have is to choose numbers that other people are less likely to have also picked."
"In my imaginary cartoon version of human evolution, the false positives of assuming there is a danger when there isn’t are usually not punished as severely as when a human underestimates a risk and gets eaten."
"A salami-slicing rounding-down attack was part of the plot of the 1999 film Office Space."
"Each slice taken off a salami sausage can be so thin that the salami does not look any different, so, repeated enough times, a decent chunk of sausage can be subtly sequestered."
"There is an interesting interplay between the laws of mathematics and the actual law."
"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."
"It is our nature to want to blame a human when things go wrong. But individual human errors are unavoidable."
"Sometimes your cheese holes just line up."
"The subtle effect here is that, while each of these individual steps may be fairly likely, the probability that they all happen simultaneously is very small."
"The main Hubble mirror under construction. ‘I can really see myself polishing that mirror.’"
"The error was in the optics which shone the light on the mirror to analyze its shape."
"Two very different bolts. Whatever you do: don’t mix them up."
"The short and unfair answer is that Sam used the wrong bolts."
"An app which points towards Mecca has to know where both the phone and Mecca are only to a low degree of accuracy to point in the right direction from most places on the planet."
"There is no way [user ID numbers] should repeat so quickly. Something had gone wrong, and the MWC1616 algorithm was to blame."
"Anything involving computing power is a constant arms race, as more powerful computers can disentangle ever bigger numbers."
"Not all random data matches a uniform distribution like you would expect from flipping a fair coin."
"Error messages are a constant source of entertainment in the tech world."
"Programming is just formalized mathematical thought and processes."
"Mistakes are going to happen, and systems need to be able to deal with that and stop them from being disasters."
"Mathematicians aren't people who find maths easy; they're people who enjoy how hard it is."
"Our modern world depends on mathematics and, when things go wrong, it should serve as a sobering reminder that we need to keep an eye on the hot cheese but also remind us of all the maths which works faultlessly around us."