Why did SIX U.S. fighter jets fail in mid-air?
A: Russian cyber attack B: Alien invasion C: They forgot to change the clocks
POPULAR SCIENCE HUMBLE PI: A COMEDY OF MATHS ERRORS by Matt Parker (Allen Lane £20, 336 pp)
BOOKS about maths can be hard work — even for me, and I did a maths degree a thousand years ago.
They’re either too difficult, with too many equations and too many explanations of things that don’t make any sense, or too Janet-and-John, terrified of making any intellectual demands at all, which, if anything, is worse.
So I think Matt Parker has pulled off something wonderful with this, his second book. He is that relative rarity, a professional mathematician and part-time stand-up comic, and I’m sure his routines about complex numbers and non- discrete topological spaces bring the house down.
His idea here is to look at the mathematical mistakes people make, and the sometimes funny, sometimes disastrous, consequences these can have.
Take the Russian shooting team at the 1908 olympic Games in London, who arrived a few days before the international shooting was scheduled to start, on July 10.
You’ll notice, though, if you study the records, a total absence of Russian names among the medal winners — or, indeed, the participants.
That’s because the Russians had forgotten that they were still using the Julian calendar, invented by Julius Caesar, while Britain — and everyone else in Europe — had changed to the Gregorian calendar just a century and a half before.
July 10 to the Russians was July 23 in real money. The shooting had been and gone.
THE Gregorian calendar corrected a numerical fault in the Julian which had meant that several hours were being added to each year and seasons were starting earlier and earlier.
Not that the Gregorian calendar is perfect. We’re still out by 27 seconds a year. That means we’ll drift by a whole day every 3,213 years.
Amazingly, there are no plans yet to fix this.
Computers are, it turns out, astoundingly vulnerable to even the smallest errors. In 2005, the U.S.’s new fighter aircraft, the F-22, came into service.
In the old days pilots used to fly aircraft, but on the F-22, pretty much everything was done by computer.
Two years later, six F-22s were flying from Hawaii to Japan when all their systems crashed at once.
As Parker explains: ‘ This was not triggered by an enemy attack or clever sabotage. The aircraft had merely flown over the International Date Line.’
No one had thought to programme this into the computers, so, when time suddenly jumped back a day, the plane freaked out and decided that shutting everything down was the best course of action.
Fortunately, there were pilots on board to take control, in the old-fashioned way. Computers, we must always bear in mind, are only as good as the idiots who programme them.
A man called Steve Null once worked for Sun Microsystems, but kept disappearing from the database.
No one could work out why, until someone pointed out that ‘NULL’ is computerese for a lack of data. So, as soon as the computer saw poor old Steve, it deleted him because he was Steve Doesn’t Actually Exist.
Similar problems have been experienced by real people called Avery Blank, Brian Test and Jeff Sample.
Actually, after reading this, you’ll be amazed that anything works at all. According to the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group, 24 per cent of all spreadsheets used in business contain a maths error. In 2012, someone at JPMorgan Chase accidentally added two cells in a spreadsheet. That simple error cost the company $2 billion.
And this has been going on a long time. The earliest scriptwriting ever discovered comes from the Sumerian city of Uruk and dates back to 3,400 BC. There’s an adding-up mistake in it.
Parker does get irritated by the smallest things. A football, as you may or may not be aware, is made up of 20 white hexagons (six-sided) and 12 black pentagons (five-sided).
He noticed that on road signs in Britain, the image of a football has black hexagons instead of pentagons. This is geometrically impossible — you can’t create a sphere out of these shapes — so Parker has organised a petition to the UK Government requesting that the signs be changed for reasons of geometrical accuracy.
I see his point but, at times, I suspect, he does well to avoid the straightjacket and padded cell.
Some of his stories, however, are superb. In 1980, the Texaco oil company was doing some exploratory oil drilling in Lake Peigneur, Louisiana.
They had been instructed only to drill in certain places, because they had to avoid the extensive salt mines that lay under the lake.
Yet someone had made a mistake with the numbers. Texaco drilled around 120 metres closer to the salt mine than they should have.
The drill made it down 370 metres before the drilling platform in the lake started to tilt.
PARKER says: ‘Arguably, the salt miners had an even bigger surprise when they saw water coming towards them.’
The drillhole was only 36cm across, but that was enough for water from Lake Peigneur to flow down into the salt mines.
The lake had 10 million cubic metres of water, and every drop went down the hole. The hole became a raging whirlpool, 400 metres in diameter.
Everyone, I’m happy to say, made it out alive, but 11 barges were lost down the hole and the whirlpool eroded nearly 70 acres of nearby land.
A freshwater lake that had been three metres deep was completely drained and refilled from the ocean. It is now a 400-metre-deep saltwater lake, with a complete change of plants and wildlife.
Whoops.