![]() They briefly pull back the curtain to reveal the math that is normally being performed unnoticed behind the scenes. The mistakes aren’t just amusing, they’re revealing. My book Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World is a collection of my favorite mathematical mistakes of all time. ![]() So all sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have bizarre consequences. Today’s world is built on mathematics: computer programming, finance, engineering. A simple math mistake can slip by unnoticed but then have terrifying consequences. When we are operating beyond intuition, we can do the most interesting things, but this is also where we are at our most vulnerable. They allow us to achieve things well beyond what our internal hardware was designed for. As a species, we have learned to explore and exploit mathematics to do things beyond what our brains can process naturally. Which makes the amount of mathematics we use in our modern society both incredible and terrifying. But if those skills cease to be used, the human brain will quickly return to factory settings. We now have school systems that force students to study math, and through enough exposure, our brains can learn to think mathematically. We were not born with any kind of ability to intuitively understand fractions, negative numbers, or the many other strange concepts developed by mathematics, but over time, your brain can slowly learn how to deal with them. But the skills that allow us to survive and form communities do not necessarily match formal mathematics. We also emerge into the world equipped for language and symbolic thought. Don’t get me wrong, we are born with a fantastic range of number and spatial skills even infants can estimate the number of dots on a page and perform basic arithmetic on them. Our human brains are simply not wired to be good at mathematics out of the box. Which brings me to the larger point: As humans, we are not good at judging the size of large numbers. It’s not like 7 million was funnier the company just didn’t bother to do the math when choosing an arbitrary large number. I find it amazing that they did not choose this big number in the first place. Pepsi took active steps to protect itself from future problems and re‑released the ad with the Harrier value at 700 million Pepsi Points.
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