Matt Parker > Quotes

“As the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman allegedly said of his own subject: ‘Physics is a lot like sex; sure it has a practical use, but that’s not why we do it.”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“There is always the chance that something else is influencing the data, causing the link. Between 1993 and 2008 the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious ‘phantom of Heilbronn’, a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s ‘most dangerous woman’ and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Sadly, very little school maths focuses on how to win free drinks in a pub.”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“A million seconds from now is just shy of eleven days and fourteen hours. Not so bad. I could wait that long. It’s within two weeks. A billion seconds is over thirty-one years. A trillion seconds from now is after the year 33,700 CE.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“the invention of the wheel is up there as the second greatest of all human inventions (slightly behind fire and just ahead of sliced bread).”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“If a new system is implemented, humans can be very resourceful when finding new ways to make mistakes.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“If you ever have access to a friend’s phone, go into the settings and change their calendar to the Buddhist one. Suddenly, they’re living in the 2560s. Maybe try to convince them they have just woken up from a coma.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Even after a lifetime of education dealing with small numbers, there is a vestigial instinct that larger numbers are logarithmic; that the gap between a trillion and a billion feels about the same as the jump between a million and a billion—because both are a thousand times bigger. In reality, the jump to a trillion is much bigger: the difference between living to your early thirties and a time when humankind may no longer exist.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“In February 2007, six F-22s were flying from Hawaii to Japan when all their systems crashed at once. All navigation systems went offline, the fuel systems went, and even some of the communication systems were out. This was not triggered by an enemy attack or clever sabotage. The aircraft had merely flown over the International Date Line.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Allowing for the two types of year (leap and normal), and the seven possible days a year can start on, there are only fourteen calendars to choose from. When I was shopping for a 2019 calendar (non–leap year, starting on a Tuesday), I knew it would be the same as the one for 2013, so I could pick up a secondhand one at a discount price. Actually, for some retro charm, I hunted down one from 1985.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Mathematicians aren’t people who find math easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“A laser ready to shoot financial data between cities. It holds the world record for the most boring laser ever.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I have no idea how stock traders respond to such an unexpected jump up; like some kind of anti-crash. I assume they jumped back in through windows and blew cocaine out of their noses.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I would be happier if we called them “phone digits” instead of “phone numbers,” because, I repeat, I don’t think they are numbers. If you’re ever not sure if something is a number or not, my test is to imagine asking someone for half of it. If you asked for half the height of someone 180 centimeters tall, they would say 90 centimeters. Height is a number. Ask for half of someone’s phone number, and they will give you the first half of the digits. If the response is not to divide it but rather to split it, it’s not a number.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“For example, to a mathematician, the number 28 is really 2×2×7, which is known as the prime decomposition of 28. Prime numbers are, in a way, the atoms of maths, the components that make up all other numbers. The non-prime numbers are known as composite numbers.”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“there is any moral to this story, it’s that, when you are writing code, remember that someone may have to comb through it and check everything when it is being repurposed in the future. It could even be you, long after you have forgotten the original logic behind the code. For this reason, programmers can leave “comments” in their code, which are little messages to anyone else who has to read their code. The programmer mantra should be “Always comment on your code.” And make the comments helpful. I’ve reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is “Good luck, future Matt.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I love the example of someone who starts work at 8 a.m. and by 12 p.m. they need to have cleaned floors eight to twelve of a building. Setting about cleaning one floor per hour would leave a whole floor still untouched come noon.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“In the apothecaries’ system of weight units, a pound is divided into 12 ounces, which each consist of 8 drams. A dram is then 3 scruples, each made from 20 grains. I hope that made sense. A grain is one 5,760th of a pound. But not a normal pound: this is a troy pound. Which is different from a normal pound. And people wonder why the metric system was invented.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Now you can safely reply and say that nothing in the Gregorian calendar can happen less frequently than once every four hundred years. JUST FOR FUN.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“I spoke off the record to a database consultant who was working with a company in Italy. They had a lot of clients, and their database would generate a client ID for each one by using something like the current year, the first letter of the client company name and then an index number to make sure each ID was unique. For some reason their database was losing companies whose names started with the letter E. It was because they were using Excel and it was converting those client IDs to be a scientific notation number, which was no longer recognized as an ID.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“So the signs remain incorrect. But at least now I have a framed letter from the UK government saying that they don’t think accurate math is important and they don’t believe street signs should have to follow the laws of geometry.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

“Even when the data has made it into a database, it is not safe... which brings us, finally, to Microsoft Excel.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“The exterior of the building was designed by architect Rafael Viñoly to have a sweeping curve, but this meant that all the reflective glass windows accidentally became a massive concave mirror—a kind of giant lens in the sky able to focus sunlight on a tiny area. It’s not often sunny in London, but when a sun-filled day in summer 2013 lined up with the recently completed windows, a death heat-ray swept across London. OK, it wasn’t that bad. But it was producing temperatures of nearly 200°F”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“living in cities was one of the things which caused humans to rely on maths. But which part of city living is recorded in our longest-surviving mathematical documents? Brewing beer. Beer gave us some of humankind’s first calculations.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“It's as if, behind our modern wizardry, Oz is revealed working overtime with an abacus and a slide rule. It's only when something goes wrong that we suddenly have a sense of how far mathematics has let us climb--and how long the drop below might be.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“People who do admit making errors are at best suspended or moved on, thus leaving behind a team who ‘do not make errors’ and have no experience of error management. – H. Thimbleby, ‘Errors + Bugs Needn’t Mean Death’, Public Service Review: UK Science & Technology, 2, pp. 18–19, 2011”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“Despite their ubiquity on the number line, transcendentals are surprisingly hard to pin down. It took until 1873 to prove that e was transcendental, making it the first number we knew for definite was. The poster-child of maths, pi, didn't join the transcendental fold until 1882. Even today, we know that at least one of e + pi and e × pi is transcendental, but we have no idea which. On David Hilbert's 1900 list of important maths problems to solve, one of them involved checking if e^pi is transcendental, and since 1934 we have known that it is. However, e^e, pi^pi, and pi^e are still open problems. Transcendentals are really hard to find in the wild.”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

“internet engineers have designated error code 418 as I’m a teapot. It is returned by any internet-enabled teapots that are sent a request to make coffee. It was introduced as part of the 1998 release of Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) specifications.”
― Matt Parker, Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

“There is one packing puzzle which, I believe, holds the record for the longest time between the answer being discovered and proof being found that this answer is definitely the correct answer. A solution was found before humans even existed, but it wasn't proved until 2001. The puzzle is: what is the best shape to pack in 2D? By 'best', we mean that this is a shape that fits together leaving no gaps and covers the maximum area possible for the length of its edges. The winner is the hexagon, as was discovered by bees long before humans even conceived of mathematics. Known as the honeycomb conjecture, it was not until millions of years later that the American mathematician Thomas Hales proved that, even if you resort to crazy shapes with strange curved sides, you'll never flat-pack better than you can with a hexagon.”
― Matt Parker, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension