Matt Parker has spent his career thus far promoting—and proving—the notion that math isn’t fearsome, it’s fun! In his 2020 bestseller Humble Pi, he examined math’s presence in daily life and what can happen when things don’t quite add up. And now, in his fascinating, funny and far-reaching Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World, he explores the significance and celebrates the wonders of his pointy favorite shape, the triangle.
Parker, an Australian-born, U.K.-based comedian, mathematician and star of popular YouTube show “Stand-up Maths,” knows there’s a lot of discomfiture around the subject, particularly trigonometry: Many think it’s scary, boring, impenetrable or not relevant to our post-school years. We might remember the Pythagorean theorem, but that’s about it.
With Love Triangle, the author is determined to change hearts and minds. “I think it’s a shame that being bored by Pythagoras is most people’s lasting impression of triangles,” he writes. “I love triangles! We all rely on triangles to keep our modern world ticking along. I would argue . . . that triangles unlock some of the most important bits of knowledge ever discovered by humans.”
Armed with boundless enthusiasm and attention to detail, Parker educates and entertains while explaining triangles’ vital role in rainbows, civil engineering, the games of pool and baseball, stars in the sky and much more. For example, the “wake behind a duck on a pond always forms an angle of 39°. Big duck, small duck; fast duck, slow duck: always 39°. Which tells us something about the way waves move in water.” And while on a visit to Japan, he uses triangles (plus a map, ruler and shadows) to figure out the height of the Tokyo Skytree, the tallest tower in the world.
Such feats of curiosity, creative problem-solving and humor are plentiful in Love Triangle, which considers triangles past (papyrus), present (3D printing) and future (satellites). Parker presents scenarios with a wide range of specificity and complexity that are bound to please the math-hesitant and math-fluent alike—and have them agreeing that “triangles are everything and everything is triangles.”
