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What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong? - with Matt Parker

The Royal Institution

1.8M subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • Presented by Matt Parker, mathematician and comedian

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

3.2M views7 years ago2 recommendations

Computer scienceTools and practiceMath for programmersDebugging

Matt Parker explores real-world mathematical and software errors, from engineering disasters to spurious patterns, with a mix of comedy and analysis.

Most of the time, the maths in our everyday lives works quietly behind the scenes, until someone forgets to carry a '1' and a bridge collapses or a plane drops out of the sky. Subscribe for regular science videos: bit.ly/RiSubscRibe Matt's book "Humble Pi" available now: geni.us/9nPhpn3 Matt Parker is a stand-up comedian and mathematician. He appears regularly on TV and online: as well as being a presenter on the Discovery Channel. His YouTube videos have been viewed over 37 million times. Previously a high-school mathematics teacher, Matt visits schools to talk to students about maths as part of Think Maths and he is involved in the Maths Inspiration shows. In his remaining free time, Matt wrote the books Things To Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension and Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors. He is also the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. This talk was filmed in the Ri on 1 March 2019. --- A very special thank you to our Patreon supporters who help make these videos happen, especially: bestape, Dave Ostler, David Lindo, Greg Nagel, Ivan Korolev, John Pollock, Lester Su, Osian Gwyn Williams, Radu Tizu, Rebecca Pan, Robert Hillier, Roger Baker, Sergei Solovev, and Will Knott --- The Ri is on Patreon: patreon.com/TheRoyalInstitution and Twitter: twitter.com/ri_science and Facebook: facebook.com/royalinstitution and Tumblr: ri-science.tumblr.com/ Our editorial policy: rigb.org/home/editorial-policy Subscribe for the latest science videos: bit.ly/RiNewsletter Product links on this page may be affiliate links which means it won't cost you any extra but we may earn a small commission if you decide to purchase through the link. #MathsMistakes, #MathFails, #MattParker, #Mathematics, #MathHumor

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its entertaining and educational look at mathematical errors, coincidences, and how small calculation mistakes cause real-world failures.

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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: link to this video

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On “Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?”

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: link to this video

codefreeordieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps”

Is this actually different from when Matt Parker discovered ancient alien wisdom by plotting the lines between Woolworths stores? ( link to this video ) Some of these maps are for time period not that distant from each other where the correlation is pretty straightforward, and those are probably telling at-least-partly-true narratives. For others, it's less clear. How many different modern and ancient maps are there which could conceivably have interesting (spurious) correlations?

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On “LibrePythonista allows running IPython code in a LibreOffice spreadsheet”

> A real artist already putting this much effort into it, would never make this mistake I'm not so sure that's true. See link to this 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.