History Main / WritersCannotDoMath

-->-- ''Fanfic/CalvinAndHobbesIILostAtSea'' (a ScriptFic that imitates a movie)[[note]][[DontExplainTheJoke 2000 is not evenly divisible into 3.]][[/note]]

* The ''ComicStrip/DickTracy'' story "The Man of a Million Faces" features a string of bank robberies committed by celebrity lookalikes -- or is it a single master of disguise? The story makes a big deal of using known heights of objects to measure (they mean "calculate") the perpetrator's height, which turns out to be a consistent 5'11". Yet a previous diagram shows a line labeled 69.9" going over his head with room to spare.
** Presumably the writer forgot that there were 12 inches to a foot, not 10.
* Another ''Dick Tracy'' story involves thieves stealing small-valued coins from parking meters. Now, $2 in nickels is only 40 coins, far less than the large handful shown, whereas when Larry throws $20 in pennies onto his mother's stomach, the size of the bag pictured is about right, but that would ''seriously'' hurt.

-->-- ''Fanfic/CalvinAndHobbesIILostAtSea'' (a ScriptFic that imitates a movie)[[note]][[DontExplainTheJoke 200 is not evenly divisible into 3.]][[/note]]

* ''Theatre/ThePajamaGame'' has a song named "Seven and a Half Cents" involving the singers detailing what they could buy with that raise over a given number of years. In each calculation, they multiply by [[https://www.reddit.com/r/askmath/comments/iqjq7c/where_did_the_pajama_games_math_go_wrong/two and a half hours of overtime]] instead of two and a quarter, resulting in the wrong answer every time.

** Near the end of the Literature/BookOfGenesis, Jacob's descendants are listed and counted as they move to Egypt. They equal 70 souls in total...except that only 69 are named. The inconsistency is specifically with Leah's children, where 32 are listed but the narrative counts 33. One possible explanation: Levi's daughter Jochebed[[note]]most notable for being the mother of Moses, Aaron and Miriam[[/note]] is the only grandchild of Jacob mentioned who was born ''after'' they arrive in Egypt. According to Jewish tradition, she makes the count because her mother was already pregnant with her when they traveled.

* ''Theatre/ThePajamaGame'' has a song named "Seven and a Half Cents" involving the singers detailing what they could buy with that raise over a given number of years. For the last figure for ten years, they forget to carry when multiplying, resulting in the wrong answer.

** For ''Film/HomeAlone2'', the Screenwriter estimated that New York City is only populated by about 200 people, only to be informed that the actual population is around 7 million at the time the film was made. Kevin's father is furious with him for spending $967 on room service, despite such a cost probably being somewhat negligible for someone who just paid to fly 14 people across the country ''twice'', implying that the Screenwriter doesn't know how much those plane tickets would cost.

But in actual mathematics, it's 3,200.[[note]](Assuming the rounding was even correct...)[[/note]]]]

-->-- ''Fanfic/CalvinAndHobbesIILostAtSea'' (a ScriptFic that imitates a movie)[[note]][[DontExplainTheJoke 2,000 is not evenly divisible into 3.]][[/note]]

** For ''Film/HomeAlone2'', the Screenwriter estimated that New York City is only populated by about 200 people, only to be informed that the actual population is around 7 million at the time the film was made. Kevin's father is furious with him for spending $967 on room service, despite the fact that he'd paid to fly 14 people across the country twice, implying that the Screenwriter doesn't know how much those plane tickets would cost.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* There is a possibly apocryphal story of Yogi Berra going to a pizza parlor and, when asked if he wanted his pizza cut into four or eight pieces, he replied [[ComicallyMissingThePoint "Better make it four, I don't think I can eat eight pieces."]]
* It particularly seems to affect journalists, most of whom seem to have left numeracy behind in primary school. A particularly egregious example is getting transport costs of goods the wrong way around - taking a box of shoes home from the shop adds 100 times more to the end cost than getting it halfway around the world from the factory due to being able to get 60,000 pairs in a $9,000 shipping container.

[[/folder]]

* SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies that forms part of [[UsefulNotes/BritishPoliticalSystem the British Government]] have been accused of this in recent times due to "doomsday" predictions for Delta and Omicron variant during the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic. Mathematicians and data analysts have questioned how well the disease experts knew the math for this.

* The stage version of ''Film/{{Hairspray}}'' starts on a Monday in "early June", 1961. It ends on June 6th, 1961. However, around 10 days pass between the beginning and ending scenes. This problem is compounded by the fact that the first Monday in June 1961, was the 4th.

* In the Bible, a temple includes a sea (large bowl) of "cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it", implying that pi is equal to 3 and not 3.14159. However, the sea is also mentioned as being a "handbreadth" thick. Taking the thickness of the sea into account, [[http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm the numbers match quite accurately.]]

* It particularly seems to affect journalists, most of whom seem to have left numeracy behind in primary school. A particularly egregious example is getting transport costs of goods the wrong way around - taking a box of shoes home from the shop adds 100 times more to the end cost than getting it halfway around the world from the factory due to being able to get 60,000 pairs in a $9000 shipping container.

* ''WebAnimation/HelluvaBoss'': In the first part of Stolas's flashback in ''The Circus'', both him and Blitzo are small children. The second part of his flashback is set 25 years later, and going based on Octavia's age it's not too long before the present day. In ''Exes and Oohs'', Moxie is stated to have left the mafia 84 years ago. This happens immediately after meeting Blitzo in prison, who was an adult at the time.

* ''WebAnimation/HelluvaBoss'': In the first part of Stolas's flashback in ''The Circus'', both him and Blitzo are small children. In the second part of his flashback 25 years later, they're adults, and Stolas's daughter Octavia Octavia is a small child. In the present day, Octavia is 17. In ''Exes and Oohs'', Moxie is stated to have left the mafia 84 years ago. This happens immediately after meeting Blitzo in prison, who was an adult at the time.

* ''WebAnimation/HelluvaBoss'': In the first part of Stolas's flashback in ''The Circus'', both him and Blitzo are small children. In the second part of his flashback 25 years later, they're adults, and Stella is stated to have laid the egg containing Octavia, who has yet to hatch. In the present day, Octavia is 17. In ''Exes and Oohs'', Moxie is stated to have left the mafia 84 years ago. This happens immediately after meeting Blitzo in prison, who was an adult at the time.

* WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic, in his ''Film/EndOfDays'' review, as part of a long string of math equations, infamously uttered that "9+9+9=21". That's about as basic of mathematics as one can get and [[TheDitz he screwed it up]]. He later apologized for it in one of his "Fuck ups" specials.

* The people of the northern [[Literature/TheBible Kingdom of Israel]], who were scattered by the Assyrians and disappear from the historical record after that, are popularly known as the "Ten Lost Tribes." The only problem is that the Northern Kingdom consisted of only ''nine'' tribes -- Reuben, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Ephraim, and Manasseh. The most likely explanation is that somebody subtracted the two tribes of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, and Benjamin, from the traditional twelve without realizing that the tribe of Simeon had disappeared from the census at this point; and the priestly tribe of Levi (which by law had no land holdings) was spread out through both kingdoms. The math was always a bit fuzzy anyway since Ephraim and Manasseh were actually ''half''-tribes (being descended from Joseph's two sons) and the other tribes would sometimes kick Dan off the list for its wickedness (having slaughtered and resettled in a defenseless town in the book of Judges).

* "Year 3000" by the Music/JonasBrothers claims the narrator visited the titular year and "Your great-great-great granddaughter" is doing all right by that time. Assuming an average generation is 30 years, they're about 27 "greats" off [[note]] In 2003, when the song was released, they would have been 997 years removed from the year 3000, or 33.23 30-year generations. Even with variances one way or another, that's way too many generations for a great-great-great grandchild to be alive to see.[[/note]]--she'd either be mummified or only kept alive as an AI by that point.

** [[spoiler:Thalassa Gramarye, Apollo and Trucy's mother,]] is said in ''Apollo Justice'' to be 40, which doing the math means [[spoiler:she had to have left the Troupe, gotten married and had Apollo at just ''18''.]] Given the lack of references to this in dialogue, combined with how old her looks in the photo taken before [[spoiler:Apollo's birth]], this is likely an error.

*** If you fail to get the correct code in the pantry, Carlos will say that a 4 digit-code has "hundreds of thousands of possible combinations". No, it doesn't: it has exactly 10,000 combinations. Akane makes a similar mistake in the infirmary when she claims there is ''over'' a thousand possible combinations for a 3-digit code when it's ''exactly'' one thousand combinations.

* It particularly seems to affect journalists, most of whom seem to have left numeracy behind in primary school. A particularly gregarious example is getting transport costs of goods the wrong way around - taking a box of shoes home from the shop adds 100 times more to the end cost than getting it halfway around the world from the factory due to being able to get 60,000 pairs in a $9000 shipping container.

-->-- ''Fanfic/CalvinAndHobbesIILostAtSea'' (a ScriptFic that imitates a movie)

This is a particular kind of continuity error that would be avoided if professional writers kept calculators at their desks. It can also come from multiple writers not checking with each other, or screwups in the timeline.

* ''ComicStrip/ForBetterOrForWorse'': Due to the [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters massive cast]], some of the supporting cast’s ages got fudged up: