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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 510
EAN num: 9780471379072
ISBN number: 0471379077
Label: Wiley
Manufacturer: Wiley
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: February 25, 2000
Publishing house: Wiley
Sale Popularity Level: 467166
Studio: Wiley
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Product Description:
'Deals in a very entertaining way with problems in normal life related to mathematics, luck, coincidence, gambling.' – The Independent (London)
Why do your chances of winning the lottery increase if you buy your ticket on Friday? Why do traffic lights always seem to be blue when youre in a hurry? Is bad luck just chance, or can it be explained?
The intriguing answers to these and other questions about the curiosities of everyday life can be found in this delightfully irreverent and highly informative book. Why Do Buses Come in Threes? explains how math and the laws of probability are constantly at work in our lives, affecting everything we do, from getting a date to catching a bus to cooking dinner. With great humour and a genuine love for the subject, Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham present solutions to such conundrums as how fast one should run in the rain to stay dry and who was the greatest sportsman of all time.Discover the mathematical explanations for the strange coincidence of two.
Presidents dying on July 4, the uncanny 'accuracy' of horoscopes, and other not-so-coincidental coincidences. Eastaway and Wyndham also reveal how television ratings work, which numbers are more likely to be big winners in the lottery, and why bad things, just like buses, always seem to happen in threes.
Whether you have a degree in astrophysics or havent touched a math problem since high school, this book sends you on a fascinating journey through the logic of life where Newtons laws explain bar fights, exploding rabbit populations, and why showers always run either too hot or too cold. Why Do Buses Come in Threes? is a delightfully entertaining ride that reveals the relevance of math in absolutely everything we do.
Amazon.com:
If you've ever bought a Lotto ticket and wondered about your bad luck afterward, you've had to deal with math. From timing to probability, it pervades our every waking moment, and even the most crippling math phobia can't make it go away. Writers Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham throw up their hands in defeat and give in to the amusing, interesting, and practical aspects of math in Why Do Buses Come in Threes? Taking their title from the oft-noticed phenomenon of clumping in mass transit, they explain in clear, commonsense language why this must be so. At the end of their description, you might be left with the uneasy sense that you just learned some math, and on quick review, you'll find that the authors have in fact snuck some in under your radar. In chapter after chapter, Eastaway and Wyndham successfully navigate statistics, codes, coincidences, and many other parts of our lives, peeling away the surface to show what's really going on to make things so weird and wonderful. Diagrams and drawings help to make their points even clearer, and there are almost never any scary formulas to frighten the timid. If you've been waiting your whole life to learn the 'Ham Sandwich Theorem,' or just want to put some old fears to rest, Why Do Buses Come in Threes? is the solution. --Rob Lightner
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Rated by buyers 
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Things aren't always what people just "know" they are. A little math and a little intelligence will separate you from the rest of the world.
If you believe in old wives tales, this book will open your eyes. (Sorry Mom.)
Rated by buyers -
This lovely little book never fails to bring revelation as I read through the chapters. Praise should be given to the authors, not only for their insights in revealing the mathematical basis of ordinary issues, but also for their enthusiasm in promoting popular science through this successful work.
Interesting examples from daily life capable of arousing curiosity were utilized to illustrate otherwise "serious" mathematical concepts: temperature of shower water (negative-feedback), dating (game-theory), "wonder numbers" in nature (golden ratio), bad luck (probability)......etc. Concepts were well-elaborated, conducted in a comprehensive and attractive, but never shallow or over-simplified, manner. The authors were just good at alluring readers to think and explore things more than "skin-deep", beyond what they seems like at surface. The writing style is attractive and humorous.
This book is of immense value in enhancing reasoning, critical thinking and, most importantly, appreciation of life itself. Highly recommended.
Rated by buyers -
While I was originally turned off by the title, which not only suggested an extremely narrow subject matter, but seemed pointed toward a younger audience (I have degrees in computer science and mathematics), I ended up reading it with great enthusiasm, usually unable to put it down for two or more hours at a time. The authors have searched far and wide for mathematical 'optical-illusions' that occur in a very broad range of everyday matters.
To put the sheer amount of subject matter crammed into this modestly sized book into perspective, the question posed by the title takes only a page or a page and a half of the book. The author(s) go from topic to topic quite rapidly, insuring that readers will never get bored. If you want indepth information, you're free to go elsewhere, but in few other places will you find so many amusing and surprising mathematical tidbits in one place.
This is a book that belongs on every elementary- and undergraduate-level instructor's bookshelf. What I remember most about my early education and what prompted me to go further in mathematics were the unintuitive ideas such as are presented in this book so well and so entertainingly. The 'birthday phenomenon' is a good example of a completely unintuitive phenomenon described by Eastaway; take a class of more than a mere 23 students, and there is a greater than 50% chance two of them will have the same birthday. How can this be so? There are 365 days in a year! There is a simple, easily understandable explanation to this. (And to illustrate my earlier point, this was honestly the only specific thing I remembered my professor explaining from my intro to statistics class).
There are probably a hundred or so examples of such mysteries presented in this book. I sincerely believe readers at all levels will enjoy the content as much as I did.
Rated by buyers -
The two messages of this book are that mathematics is important to everyday life, and that it's fun. Like the earlier books of Martin Gardener, this book aims to make mathematics relevant and accessible, but with a British rather than American slant.
Have you ever wondered why flowers often have five petals, how bookies' odds work, how you always end up in the slowest queue, or, indeed, why buses come in threes? If so, then this is the book for you.
In the course of a humorous, chatty discourse on the mysteries of life the authors introduce a number of branches of mathematics, including probability, topology, statistics and queuing theory, to name just a few.
To aid casual readers or those who've previously found the subject forbidding the maths is kept at a fairly simple level. However there's still enough detail to be useful in other applications. I used this book as a reminder when trying to solve a problem related to software performance, and others who don't exercise their maths every day might also find it a useful memory jogger.
Whether as an introduction if you've never enjoyed maths before, or a reminder if you have, I thoroughly recommend this book. I can also recommend the companion volume "How Long is a Piece of String?"
Rated by buyers 
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This book is a superb sampler of interesting aspects of math. I found it very similiar to "A mathemetician reads the newspaper" by Paulos (also a great book). People who like Paulos will like this book a lot.
Parts that I particularly loved were the coverage of sections not treated in other, similiar texts. How fast to run in the rain to stay the driest, how to cut oddly shaped cakes into equal parts, etc.
Parts that I found the least exciting were the re-treatments of the stuff of standard layman's math books- does the world need another description of the travelling salesman problem, or Fibonacci sequences throughout nature? (though these descriptions are better than most that Ive read)
Overall, this book was very enjoyable. If you've read no "math and the world books" you will think it is 5 stars, and if you've read many of them you will think 4 stars (or just skip those chapters)
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