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Love Triangle

The Life-changing Magic of Trigonometry

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

A #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Explore the life-changing magic of trigonometry with Matt Parker, stand-up mathematician and No. 1 bestselling author of Humble Pi

Why can no two people ever see the same rainbow? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? Why does the wake behind a duck always form an angle of exactly 39 degrees? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle.
In Love Triangle, stand-up comedian, ex-maths teacher and Sunday Times number one bestselling author Matt Parker is on a mission to prove why we should all show a lot more love for triangles, along with the useful trigonometry and geometry they enable. To make his point, he uses triangles to create his own digital avatar, survive a harrowing motorcycle ride, cut a sandwich into three equal parts, and measure tall buildings while wearing silly shoes. But soon these hare-brained experiments begin to reveal a genuinely important truth: triangles are the hidden pattern beneath the surface of the contemporary world, used in everything from GPS to CGI via Spotify streaming, the play button and your best mate's triangle tattoo.
Join Matt Parker as he demonstrates why there's more to triangles than Pythagoras and SOHCAHTOA. Triangles are everything and everything is triangles.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 10, 2024
      “We all rely on triangles to keep our modern world ticking along,” according to this disappointing paean. Parker (Humble Pi), a comedian and former math teacher who runs the Stand-up Maths YouTube channel, notes that video game graphics are composed of countless tiny triangles because they can be computed more quickly than other shapes and that civil engineers favor triangular support structures because they’re reliably rigid (“Three side-lengths can only form one triangle,” whereas rectangles can transform into any number of parallelograms if their sides shift). Parker sometimes strays from his subject, as when he devotes a lengthy passage to chronicling the decades-long hunt for “a polygon which could perfectly cover a surface but in a way which never repeats” on the slim premise that he thinks the solution, a 13-sided shape discovered in 2023, bears a vague resemblance to an equilateral triangle. Other discussions get mired in mathematical minutiae, such as when he breaks down how to use the sine function to determine the size of a U.S. military satellite’s telescope mirror based on information gleaned from a photograph the satellite took of an Iranian rocket launch site. Puerile puns peppered throughout don’t help (he suggests that manufacturing triangular windows is a “real pane in the glass”). This misses the mark. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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