Why Do Buses Come in Threes?: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life [Paperback]

Robert Eastaway (Author), Jeremy Wyndham (Author), Rob Eastaway (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1861052472 | ISBN-13: 978-1861052476 | Publication Date: May 2004

Why is it better to buy a lottery ticket on a Thursday? Why are showers always too hot or too cold? And what's the connection between Rob Andrew taking a conversion in rugby and a tourist trying to get the best photograph of Nelson's Column? These and many other fascinating questions are answered in this entertaining and highly informative book ideal for anyone wanting to remind themselves - or discover for the first time - that math is relevant to almost everything that we do. As explained here, dating, cooking, travelling, gambling and even life-saving are all linked with intriguing mathematical problems. Whether you have a PhD in astrophysics or haven't touched a math problem since your school days, this book will give you a fresh understanding of the hidden math in the world around you.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

'An interesting read for even the most maths-phobic' - The Good Book Guide --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Robson Books (May 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861052472
• ISBN-13: 978-1861052476
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,376,924 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Superb book for non mathemeticians, February 14, 2001

By 

Noah R. Freeman "noah_freeman" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life (Paperback)

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)

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars how come buns come in dozens but weiners come in eights?, June 21, 2000

By 

"christianskeptic" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life (Paperback)

this is an entertaining look at math and how it permeates our lives and pervades nature. the authors cover a variety of topics ranging from explaining coincidences to why we always get stuck in traffic jams. the best chapter is ch.1, titled Why can't I find a four leaf clover? they explain how Fibonacci's series turn up so often in plants (the number of petals, for example, is always a, or a multiple of, a fibonacci number), as well as the golden ratio, pi, and why cells in beehives are shaped like hexagons. the pervasiveness of hidden mathematics in nature can make one wonder whether there's an intelligence behind it all.

the book also contains a number of mathematical formulas. i remember reading somewhere that for every equation given in a book, sales drop by 5000 (or some number like that). Hopefully that won't happen here.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating book, July 24, 2005

By 

The Last Person You'd Expect (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Why Do Buses Come in Threes: The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life (Hardcover)

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.