It seems the first human whose name has been passed down through millennia of history was not a ruler, a warrior or a priest … but an accountant.

Pero me encantaron los capítulos de ingeniería, geometría, probabilidad, aleatoriedad, estadística, sesgos etcétera. It’s not often sunny in London, but when a sun-filled day in summer 2013 lined up with the recently completed windows, a death heat-ray swept across London. I enjoyed the book but was a little disappointed that so much was taken from fields of computing and engineering, where the issue wasn't strictly a mathematical failure, but a failure, for example, to understand the limits of binary, or load-bearing, or resonant frequency.

When the exercise class on the twelfth floor had ‘The Power’, the thirty-eighth floor started shaking around ten times more than it normally did. Walkways built in a Kansas City Hyatt collapsed when the length of the bolts were tweaked; the collapse caused 114 deaths.

On 5 July 2011 they had decided to work out to Snap’s ‘The Power’, and everyone jumped around harder than they usually did. The reduced precision in a rounded number makes them also feel less accurate, even though that is often not the case.

If I was to wear a ‘I’m too intelligent to play football’ t-shirt, I would, rightly enough, I guess, be considered grossly insulting. You can almost hear that in that slick documentary voice-over style, where everything spells doom: "Will the team find a way out, . Some of the stories read like jokes – in the sense that you know there is going to be a punchline coming soon, and so you try to guess it before it comes. In Los Angeles there is a block of land on the corner of West 1st Street and South Spring Street which houses the offices of the LA Times.