Love Triangle: How Trigonometry Shapes the World

“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. (Aug.)