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What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong? - with Matt Parker

The Royal Institution · 3.3M views · 2019-03-07 · 1:07:34

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Overview

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

On Hacker News

Used as a funny, accessible reference for coincidences, spurious patterns and maths errors.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

Recreational & visual mathStand-up & sketch comedyCivil engineering & construction
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matt parkerhumble picoincidencerecreational mathsengineering failures

What people said

modderation · 2024-06 · Recommendation

He also covered this in a more recent talk [1] which has some better audio and a direct feed of the slides. It also comes with an entirely different set of interesting stories for anyone inclined to listen :) 1: [VIDEO]

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db48x · 2020-12 · Recommendation

Nothing, as long as we learn the art of discerning coincidence from causation. An important part of that is deliberately noticing how many possibilities we're picking amongst when we single out a coincidence. Here's a funny anecdote about the same topic: [VIDEO]

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olejorgenb · 2024-09 · Reference

> A real artist already putting this much effort into it, would never make this mistake I'm not so sure that's true. See [VIDEO] Granted - most of the examples in Matt Parker's talk isn't exactly work of art, but I'm sure effort were put into them. Edit: I agree the way the cogs don't work in the project's logo is of a different class, so maybe you have point.

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Sources

Video by The Royal Institution, played through YouTube.

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