#MTBoSYuleBlog - A book I read in 2021

 

A Book I Read in 2021...

If you know anything about me, you know I LOVE to read.  When we travelled as a kid, my suitcase usually had more books than clothes.  Even now, when going on a roadtrip, I usually take a book or two in my bag.  My tablet is used almost exclusively for the Kindle app and used bookstores are one of my favorite places to go.

I'm definitely a fan of "beach reads" - those novels that keep your interest but don't require much thinking, but I do enjoy reading professional books and nonfiction as well.  I've been on the lookout for books that I could use for my "Math Bookshelf" but would also provide some interesting stories for class...

Earlier this year, when I ran across Humble Pi by Matt Parker on Kindle for only $1.99, I snapped it up.  Sadly, it's no longer at that price, but I would still recommend the book for anyone looking for interesting math mistakes and I plan to add it to my used bookstore shopping list to get a physical copy.

I liked that I could read a chapter or two, then step away from the book without losing continuity.  More times than not, I found myself reading excerpts to hubby, especially ones that dealt with computer programming or video games, since those are his interests.  

One of the stories in the book is one that I had learned about this past summer while researching fun facts for my classroom about the USS Yorktown shutting down after a dividing by zero error.  Mathematically, I know you can't divide by zero and that it would give an error, but what I didn't know is what is going on at that time in the computer's brain.  Humble Pi explained about the idea of division as repeated subtraction and the continually subtracting zero would create this never ending loop and eventually an overflow error which shut down the system - How cool is that!

But honestly, it was the end of the book that really got me and I had to screenshot a paragraph to share...

As a math teacher, we often hear about how our brain grows when we make mistakes, but what we don't do well is really talk about those mistakes - we shove them under the rug and hope no one notices.  In Humble Pi, Mr. Parker talks about some of the big mistakes - bridges that collapsed, the O-ring failure with the Challenger, errors in unit conversion - but we all make mistakes and we can all learn FROM mistakes.  

In the quote above, there are a couple of posters that I want to make for my classroom.  I want to help my students see the beauty of math, the challenge, that with perseverance, they can achieve great things.  I want them to question and explore the "what if" questions.  I want to move beyond the state standards that say they have to learn the Triangle Congruence theorems and move into the big ideas of WHY we need a solid foundation in mathematics.

One of the things I enjoyed about this book was the look at how important math is to our world and how a slight change can alter the mathematics significantly.  Humble Pi is definitely a book that I will refer back to on a regular basis with its story-telling nature and compelling mathematics.