Product Description

With a foreword by Tim Rice, this book will change the way you see the world. 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 maths 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 maths problem since your school days, this book will give you a fresh understanding of the hidden maths in the world around you.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14651 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
If you've ever bought a Lottery ticket and wondered about your bad luck afterwards, you've had to deal with math. From timing to probability, it pervades our every waking moment, and even the most crippling maths-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, common-sense 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 maths and on a 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 our lives so weird and wonderful. Diagrams and drawings help to make their points even clearer and there are almost never any scary formulae 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, Amazon.com

Review
"'An interesting read for even the most maths-phobic' - 'The Good Book Guide'; 'Very entertaining' - 'Sunday Telegraph'; 'A fascinating book' - 'Daily Mail'"

From the Author
We have tried to make this a maths book ANYONE can read.
There are many excellent popular mathematics books on the market, but often these are about relatively abstract parts of the subject. In "Why do buses come in threes?", Jeremy Wyndham and I approached the subject from a different angle. First we posed questions that everyone asks, and then we answered them by explaining the mathematics. The most exciting endorsement we had was when the Daily Mail and The Sun both printed whole pages about the book. However, we have tried not to trivialise the subject. A maths graduate should still find plenty in the book that is interesting and novel. You may be interested to know that one of the first titles we considered for the book was "Dinner Party Mathematics" because we thought the contents were suitable material for stimulating conversation. But in the end we opted for Buses, and we don't regret it! The book is now in its second print.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant! Maths Made Even More Fun!
I was looking for a book to widen my knowledge of Maths, because I am thinking of applying to do it at university. I wanted to read around the subject in an interesting way. "Why Do Buses Come In Threes" was a brilliant read! It makes Maths a lot of fun and it tells you about many different ways in which Maths can be used in real-life. Most of the book is easy to understand, although some of it is harder and more mathematical, but it is truly great and I would definitely recommend it.

A different kind of maths book
Maths books, even 'popular' ones, generally approach the subject from an abstract point of view. That is partly because mathematics is a beautiful subject in its own right, regardless of its link with the real world. The problem, however, is that most people don't see it that way. What makes 'Why do buses' different is that it is centred firmly on the world of everyday experiences that most people can relate to, like coincidences and traffic jams, and from that starting point it goes on to explore the mathematical ideas behind those phenomena. The book isn't nearly as mathematical as it could be, but if there was more maths in it, I'm prepared to bet that far fewer people would ever have read it, which would defeat the point of it.

An excellent reminder about why maths is fun
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?"