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What Happens When Maths Goes Wrong? - with Matt Parker

May 31, 2021
Oh, calm down, thank you all so much for coming to have an exciting evening of mathematics. My name is Matt Parker. He used to be a math teacher, so I know that person is on the phone while I'm speaking honestly. I was once a teacher. a teacher, so can everyone hear me loud enough, amplified through the microphone, excellent people, upstairs, we are all happy, wonderful, so the plan for tonight, as our Peter very kindly said in his presentation and then went home, is that a big vote of confidence for tonight's event? hook, as he very kindly put it.
what happens when maths goes wrong   with matt parker
I do a wide range of things related to promoting mathematics or generally just trying to get more people excited about mathematics and I do things like YouTube videos, which is where I suspect the vast majority of young people come from. you know and I do BBC Radio 4, which is the rest of you, so high that I cover the whole spectrum, so I recently wrote a humble book and previously I had written a book called Things to make him do in the four dimensions, as mentioned in the introduction is currently the second most viewed video on the RI channel even though it's all abstract math and I think tonight with some applied math I'm taking number one so I wrote the first book and Penguin, the publishers They said: would you like it? writing a second book and the problem with the things they forced him to do in the fourth dimension is that, although he was incredibly proud of it and although it sold very well for a massive book, it sold average for a book, which It's great, average.
what happens when maths goes wrong   with matt parker

More Interesting Facts About,

what happens when maths goes wrong with matt parker...

It's just that I'm over 50% of the books, I'm very happy with that, okay, but the penguins don't care

what

's in the book, right? They could publish another celebrity cookbook or anything. I mean, that's the only option really, so I had to convince them it was a good decision to publish a book about mathematics, so I suggested that I could write a book about my favorite math errors, that's where a comedy of math errors emerged. and they liked it because people like stories. of disasters they like stories of things going

wrong

they like to laugh at other people I've made a career out of being on the receiving end of that and that's it, yeah, I write that book that's cool people who are specifically math nerds, which is your education way of describing my proper target demographic, people still enjoyed reading these stories and my ulterior motive was to show examples of where math

goes

wrong

in everything from financial engineering, you know, statistics, medicine, you name it.
what happens when maths goes wrong   with matt parker
I can prove that it's an excuse to talk about math. that is necessary for these areas of our modern society, and obviously mathematics works perfectly most of the time, to the point that most people have no idea how dependent we are on mathematics and people often do not value math for that reason, so I thought This is a great excuse to talk about all the places where math is used, but by using things that go wrong as my way in and actually because I used to be a math teacher , can you cheer up the math teachers who are hiding at the top?
what happens when maths goes wrong   with matt parker
Doesn't sound exciting, it's the end of the semester, right? Well, they were, so I used to be a math teacher, just like the good people who cowered at the top of the room and then I left teaching, but I still remembered how a lot of young people because

when

you're in school you are forced to do math well

when

you are forced to do it many people perceive math as a subject where you have to do well, getting the right answer is everything. the end of everything in mathematics and as a teacher you know that is not always strictly true, good mathematics is about trying something and doing it wrong and then trying it again and hopefully doing it less wrong and then more wrong and, hopefully , converge. make as few mistakes as possible, but it's a long, slow process of not understanding it and not getting it right, and it's always very disappointing when students or even people who know, standard humans are afraid to try some math because they think that if they don't get the right answer they haven't done it right and that's not true if you get the wrong answer you can still be right and you're trying right math is about learning and teaching your brain how to think and so I thought how I can apply that approach to

what

would otherwise be just a random collection of massive errors that have no real meaning and, you know, I started with an inspirational poster that I had when I was a teacher and the Inspirational posters are the staple of the world of teaching, it's what you decorate your classroom with and this was one of my absolute favorites.
Education works best when all parts work. Now let me break this down for you so you have the gears. representing the students, teachers and parents, and the problem is when that big gear on the right that represents the students, if it turns, it says clockwise because it fits with the teachers, the teachers have to turn clockwise. counterclockwise, that's very nice, but I'm not going anywhere either because parents are Disrupting the whole system, yes surprisingly there is more applause with teachers and parents, surprisingly accurate poster in my humble experience , okay, and then obviously people just haven't thought about the geometry of this situation.
If you have gears, they have to go clockwise. clockwise, counterclockwise, so in Manchester we are introducing their new approach to public transport, they went with the classic three gears that make the city work together or the people He pointed it out and proceeded to render in 3D, that's just this point of view. possibly from the sides it's okay it's like it's well played well played before you see that's right you don't look that steep I mean they were thinking they were several steps ahead until I saw an article where President Trump in The United States was negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and when that was published in the newspapers to show how all the active parts of North America should move in unison, use this illustration, wait, they have already used their third dimension , TRUE?
They won't get it back. I paid money, I paid a good amount of money to license that image and put it in my book just so I could use the title making gears cool again, so it was worth it and eventually two pound coins when The two pound coin came out to celebrate the Millennium, so there was a competition to design this was the winning proposal and it has different concentric circles, I guess, that show different stages of the history of the United Kingdom and the one in the middle, sort of of mechanical era, here is a series of gears and because if one gear

goes

clockwise, the one next to us goes counterclockwise, then clockwise clockwise, counterclockwise, you have to have an even number of gears as you turn, the two pound coin has an odd number of gears, it wouldn't work, people on the internet were not impressed. and smug in equal measure and the Royal Mint issued a statement saying it doesn't

matt

er, does it, just what are you saying?
It's meant to represent that age and I thought it's funny, I wonder why there's a 50/50. I don't know what would be a great example to simulate a 50/50 probability. Imagine flipping something correctly. It could go either way if you do it randomly and get an order and an even number of gears, so I looked. The person who designed this coin is called Bruce Russian, he is an art teacher in Norfolk and on his website he has his original design that would have worked. He has an even number of gears. The actual coin that was made, these three gears were removed, meaning it wouldn't work, I said, wow, he liked that I'd done it right and the Royal Mint broke it, but it was that deliberate, so I sent him a email.
I think hey, I'm so sorry, I'm sure people have pointed this out to me. I'm just curious because I noticed you did it well, it was deliberate. Did you think about it? It was a concern, but what happened? I'm writing a book about math errors. I'm curious what your thought process was and he responded to say that. he didn't think as an artist it should be correct, he thought it's representative, a bunch of gears, it doesn't make any difference to the artistic value of the design and to be honest I agree with him, then he said he decided to make it work anyway because otherwise I would get a ton of annoying emails from her.
I don't know why he was involved in that part there, you say so and so, yeah, he just thought people would complain, they'd leave. over and over again about this and now this is the unfortunate advantage because when I was writing a book about errors I didn't want it to be just about finishing theoretical math problems in which there are things that people thought had proven something and they hadn't. made. t and that's interesting for a small demographic that includes this guy, but there's also the kind of pedantic: you're wrong, I'm right, which is the opposite of it's okay to make mistakes, which is one of the things I want to convey. and many mistakes don't really

matt

er, so I looked for a copy of this book.
I remembered it years and years and years ago. I forgot, well I didn't have it when I was a kid. I must have seen some, I mean a lot of my procreate friends and I saw somewhere this book, this is a Sesame Street book, this is Ernie expressing his disgust at the possibility of being forced to live on the moon, which seems a niche concern, but there you have it and I can't get it down. I found a copy of this book on the Internet and there is one thing about this that really bothers me, it is not important, it is not a major problem, does anyone, apart from the kid who had a very loud epiphany there, like to say what has of bad?
These stars where the moon should be, you are one hundred percent right, what are they? There's no hole in the moon as far as I know in the extended Sesame Street universe there are no Muppet bases we can see blinking on the moon, right? and then you often see a crescent moon and then you see stars shining through it and no, the moon is fine from our point of view, a disk, right, and it's always there, it blocks the stars, we just see different parts depending on how it's illuminated and That's an artistic version of that, in a weird way, I'm fine with that, but I think they shouldn't show stars through the crescent moon, come on, a little astronomy for everyone, and then I was looking for other examples and, actually, Sesame should.
I've done this more than once and I was looking separately at license plates from the state of, so this is a Texas license plate and as you can see it celebrates the fact that the shuttle was involved in Texas and there's the shuttle that didn't. That's wrong. angle actually for the shuttle taking off, surprisingly it no longer has any of its thrusters or anything, so maybe that's the landing. I don't know, I got distracted here by that star, that star is dangerously close to that, but the only way to know for sure would be to somehow buy some Texas license plates, so I did and they came in the mail.
There we are, this is really genuine. I scanned it so I could get a high resolution version because all the ones online were very low resolution and if you zoom in and fill in the rest of the Texas moon broken up by a lone star, people have since pointed out that maybe is marked with the first Apollo landing site and it is very close, I could give you that to be completely honest, but believe that these problems are because they are not okay if we are just talking about whether there are practical implications for the problems in this case, if we don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of getting mass right and good mass PR and mass is important but because in practice they are important and unfortunately in those cases it's not really important but sometimes mass It may be important, so you may have noticed that I am dancing around a large mass.
The Jenga tower and I thought about setting this up during my show to artificially increase the amount of suspense for narrative purposes, no, so this is to show a fantastic effect on resonance, so this is a building and we're going to show you. in a second how a building resonates hopefully to destruction we will see how lucky we are or how unlucky we are depending on what I am trying to do at that moment you will normally hear about resin when it comes to bridges so there are little bridges that I have had resonance problems dating back to I think I guess what I came across was in the 1800s, near Manchester, where there is now sulfate, there was a bridge and there were some troops marching on the bridge because everyone was on the bridge. step andSo we got the box and they opened it and there were still bits of swamp and bits of our instrument, so this is one of the brains of one of the instruments in the group, so we built the instrument that measures what we can talk about. that did the mission, but it was sent to study the environments around the Earth, so the Earth's magnetic field and the particle environment and this is the brains of the instrument that measured the electrons in the environments around the Earth and what research you do, then my research is really related.
I study the Sun and I'm interested in how the sun's activity impacts the Earth's magnetic field creating something called Space Weather and this cluster mission was designed to study space weather so one of the things it did was observe the processes physicists behind the generation of the aurora. The northern lights and aurora are generated by solar activity. That sounds useful. I mean, I mean what. Do you like it? Don't know. I'm actually married to Lucy. Only yes, because otherwise I thought it would be pretty convincing if your parents are watching. They're like he never asked. We have meteorite rings.
Look at us, nerds. fight well I guess you are using it well so you read the clothes by the way because why do you have to wear gloves to handle this well? We think it's probably still covered in rocket fuel and that's not good for you. Don't know. I want to recover and have dinner later, but I want to say it's cool to see these bits that are completely destroyed and normally our instruments don't come back, so these bits were built in our labs and we got them back. Again, I think I'm one of them. There was a small label that said UCL Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory.
Someone like you know, if they find him, send him home to us. They thought it would take millions of years and be a distant civilization, but no. That's how it was and when you got there, you started working there right after this happened, right after this happened, so when we launched the spaceship, of course, we wanted to have a big party where you got together to celebrate and they bought champagne for I drank after the release and I came in about two years later and that champagne was still there unfortunately under UNK, yeah, but I mean we could talk about the success story because we rebuilt these instruments, so they were released again, they were released again, yes. the European Space Agency gave us the money to rebuild the instruments and it took much less time, so in four years they were rebuilt and relaunched and they are still working and they are still working, so we launched them in 2000 and what are we now? 2019, the ones that are in space now are still running successfully because it exploded in 96, so they really changed pretty quickly, yeah, yeah, and we were actually chatting with a friend of yours and last night we didn't.
We were chatting. to a friend and she said oh I was watching the live stream because my PhD was going to be in Cluster and she was a first year PhD student watching the live stream and we thought about what happened and she was like the room was in silence and then everyone left. Wow, he's a different PhD I guess. Where do they live now? So they live in my apartments and we have some on display because, like I said, we built four instruments and we have quite a bit of hardware beat up and, yeah, we keep them out, we talk to people about the mission talk about what we would do, what they know, what which we did successfully to launch it again and I think it just serves as a reminder that it's not always okay so we'll get them out before it actually hits them so a great round.
They already have a professor, Lucy Greene, people spend as much time working on a spaceship as a miche spends decades making it work, and they have some of them in the lab's coffee room, just like in the display case, so a reminder for the next one. generation of space scientists that their decades of work can disappear in a split second and land in a swamp and what happened with that was that there was a sensor in the navigation part of the Ariane 5 rocket that well, this part of the rocket took input from various sensors, took the raw data coming from those sensors, converted it into meaningful navigation information, and then sent it to the main processor that was powering the rocket, so to speak, and when the numbers came in, they had to figure them out. how big were they going to be because you have to allocate a certain amount of memory and they tended to allocate only 16 bits, 16 ones and zeros for an incoming value, but some of them could be larger, they could be up to 64 and then what ? they did it because they could have written something in the program that was for each input that came in, check how big it was before trying to send it to memory, but that takes up quite a bit of processor and they had pretty strict limitations on how to do that. how much power they were allowed to use and then instead of checking each sensor they looked for all the sensors that could give a number greater than 16 binary digits and checked them to avoid problems and the ones that could never be that big, They didn't bother to check it correctly and were able to save some processing and everything worked great on the Ariane 4.
Then they copied it to the Ariane 5 without checking it again and due to a different takeoff trajectory and the way the sensors worked. of the sensors that were previously not being checked well continued to go unchecked but now they should have been checked and didn't actually have to be on, they just left it on after launch, it was a pre-launch sensor because if ever there was a launch attempt and then they aborted before takeoff and then restarted, it took forever to restart so they didn't turn them off right away, they let them run and then turned them off once they were sure it was definitely safe, however It continued running as it took off.
He got a value that was too big. It didn't fit in memory. He put it. The memory went to the side and everything crashed. What would you know about himself? It hasn't been the worst because it could have been a reboot or something, except it was designed to give a crash report, so you know, like the stereotype of someone like, oh, you know, tell my spouse I love him , right?, but this is like, I say my successfully debugged the following failure context information, so it sent the debug message over the same link to the main processor, which it didn't know could happen, it thought they were navigation data, he thought the rocket had suddenly veered to one side, he tried to correct it. it hadn't veered to one side and the correction threw it to the side, shattering it, the self-destruct sequence was initiated and because an attempt was made to place a 64 digit number in a 16 digit space, this entire rocket exploded and possibly because the spaceships were not insured, which is amazing how one in three decided to refund it correctly, so a massive little mistake can have phenomenal implications and that's it from me.
I guess in conclusion I started with the theory of major errors and in In some cases, yes, we have to get the mass right. I mean, we'll get it wrong occasionally, but we have to get it right in a lot of these critical situations and that means we need people who are good at mass and repair to put in the effort. Because with math we can do more than our brain was originally designed to do well, we can go beyond our intuition, which I think is amazing, but ironically, getting mathematicians and people who are willing to put in the effort to work hard and, most importantly, come. with systems that accept that humans will make mistakes and we can use our same mathematical logic to have solid systems where errors do not turn into disasters to have all that we need people who are not afraid to make mistakes to learn mathematics correctly.
I guess the other goal of my book is to show people all the incredible critical mathematics that underpins our society. I also wanted to encourage people not to get into math, it's hard, but people who enjoy math and not people who find it. It's easy, it's the people who enjoy how hard it is, it's hard work, you get it wrong, but gradually it will teach your brain how to think and gradually you will get better and better at math, so I will physically be here signing books if you want get one later this video will end up on the internet.
If you are seeing it on the Internet, you can order it. It's not an error in the URL. It only works if you place the dot in the wrong place. I think I'm funny, actually the penguin will like it, but it doesn't work if you put it as a humble: PI comm doesn't work. I don't like it, yeah, people have to earn the book like we didn't think you understood marketing. So right now I'll also be signing books and calculators, although I'm done. Thank you so much for your patience. Thank you very much for making that work.

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