Parker, Matt

  • Love triangle

    £24.85

    What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? What did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle. Humans have been using triangles for thousands of years to build structures, measure the earth, make music, paint vanishing points, pot snooker balls and much, much more. But trigonometry is not a thing of the past – triangles underpin all of modern data technology. When someone Snapchats a photo, the light travels into the camera as electromagnetic sine waves, Fourier analysis compresses the image and then trigonometry is used to send the data to someone else’s phone; when you listen to a track on Spotify, triangles remove the sounds which a human ear can’t perceive and reassemble the song so that it’s small enough to stream.

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  • Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

    £10.99

    Matt Parker, the brilliant stand-up mathematician, shows us what happens when maths goes wrong in the real world. We would all be better off if everyone saw mathematics as a practical ally. Sadly, most of us fear maths and seek to avoid it. This is because mathematics doesn’t have good ‘people skills’ – it never hesitates to bluntly point out when we are wrong. But it is only trying to help! Mathematics is a friend which can fill the gaps in what our brains can do naturally. Luckily, even though we don’t like sharing our own mistakes, we love to read about what happens when maths errors make the everyday go horribly wrong. Matt Parker explores and explains near misses and mishaps with planes, bridges, the Internet and big data as a way of showing us not only how important maths is, but how we can use it to our advantage.

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