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Love Triangle

Love Triangle

The Life-changing Magic of Trigonometry

Summary

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.

Reviews

  • This book is an attempt to rescue trigonometry from the bounds of boredom... Parker, who was born in Australia, is maths royalty... Parker is funny, likeable and aware enough of his audience to carry them along. And those who persevere will end up smarter than they were when they started it. You’ll use triangles to understand Einstein’s relativity, and end up at the stark realisation that, at the quantum level, matter — you, I, this book — is all just a set of triangles
    Tom Calver, Sunday Times

About the author

Matt Parker

Originally a maths teacher from Australia, Matt Parker is now a stand-up comedian and a YouTuber with over one hundred million views. He is the author of the #1 bestseller Humble Pi and Things to Make and Do in the Fourth
Dimension. Matt is also frequently seen, heard, and read on the Discovery Channel, on BBC radio, and in The Guardian, in that order. He has previously held world records for both the Rubik's Cube and Space Invaders. In the pursuit of maths, Matt has: flipped a coin 10,000 times, travelled to Antarctica, memorized p to hundreds of digits, and been bitten by a bullet ant in the Amazon rainforest. Matt has given maths lectures at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Harvard University and Lake Monger Primary School.
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