Parker is an ex-high school maths teacher who now works as a maths communicator. He's perfect for the job. Parker has a unique way of presenting maths that is laugh out loud funny while at the same time being inspiring and educational.
Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors is Parker's second book, and was just published this year. After a wait of several weeks I finally had my turn with a copy from our local library. It was definitely worth the wait. I highly recommend it.
In Humble Pi, Parker tells lots of real life stories about how maths errors have caused problems in the real world. There are plenty of engineering problems of wobbly buildings and bridges, or crashing planes and spaceships. There are wrong street signs and advertising posters. There are computer programming mistakes and ancient Sumerian tablet mistakes. There are mistakes that caused billions of dollars in losses. And there are mistakes which are just really annoying.
Along with the fun storytelling, Parker does a brilliant job of educating us with plenty of thought-provoking maths.
But I think the most important thing that Parker does brilliantly is to emphasise that maths is about making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. It is about putting the effort in. To quote Parker:
Mathematicians aren't people who find maths easy; they're people who enjoy how hard it is.Finally, I love how Parker numbered the pages in the book. The first page is 314; the last page is 1. Awesome! It's with a maths book that for the first time I have to do less maths as I read. With this book I didn't have to do subtraction in my head to work out how many pages I had left to read. After all, that's the main purpose of page numbering, isn't it?
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