What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong? - with Matt Parker
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as a funny, accessible reference for coincidences, spurious patterns and maths errors.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends db48x · 2020-12 · on “Ask HN: Astronomical Coincidences. What does it mean?”
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: [this video]
Recommends modderation · 2024-06 · 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: [this video]
Cites olejorgenb · 2024-09 · 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 [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.