100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World“Where else does math become a romp, full of entertaining tricks and turns?”—Bryce Christensen, Booklist Have you ever considered why you always get stuck in the longest line? Why two’s company but three’s a crowd? Or why there are six degrees of separation instead of seven? In this hugely informative and endlessly entertaining book, John D. Barrow takes the most baffling of everyday phenomena and—with simple math, lucid explanations, and illustrations—explains why they work the way they do. His witty, crystal-clear answers shed light on the dark and shadowy corners of the physical world we all think we understand so well. |
Contents
| 7 | |
| 14 | |
Pylon of the Month | 21 |
Tally Ho | 34 |
Racing Certainties | 40 |
Superficiality | 47 |
Emergence | 56 |
Positive Feedback | 62 |
The Twoheaded League | 164 |
Creating Something out of Nothing | 166 |
How to Rig an Election | 169 |
The Swing of the Pendulum | 172 |
A Bike with Square Wheels | 174 |
How Many Guards Does an Art Gallery Need? | 176 |
and What About a Prison? | 181 |
A Snooker Trick Shot | 183 |
The Flaw of Averages | 69 |
The Origami of the Universe | 71 |
Easy and Hard Problems | 73 |
Is This a Record? | 76 |
A DoItYourself Lottery | 79 |
Do Not Believe It | 81 |
Flash Fires | 83 |
The Secretary Problem | 86 |
the WinWin Solution | 90 |
Many Happy Returns | 93 |
Tilting at Windmills | 96 |
Verbal Conjuring | 99 |
Financial Investment with Time Travellers | 101 |
A Thought for Your Pennies | 104 |
Breaking the Law of Averages | 107 |
How Long are Things Likely to Survive? | 109 |
A President who Preferred the Triangle to the Pentagon | 112 |
Secret Codes in Your Pocket | 116 |
Ive Got a Terrible Memory for Names | 120 |
Calculus Makes You Live Longer | 122 |
Getting in a Flap | 124 |
Your Numbers Up | 127 |
Double Your Money | 129 |
Some Reflections on Faces | 131 |
The Most Infamous Mathematician | 135 |
Roller Coasters and Motorway Junctions | 139 |
A Taylormade Explosion | 143 |
Walk Please Dont Run | 146 |
Mindreading Tricks | 148 |
The Planet of the Deceivers | 150 |
How to Win the Lottery | 152 |
A Truly Weird Football Match | 155 |
An Arch Problem | 157 |
Counting in Eights | 159 |
Getting a Mandate | 161 |
Brothers and Sisters | 186 |
Playing Fair with a Biased Coin | 189 |
The Wonders of Tautology | 191 |
What a Racket | 193 |
Packing Your Stuff | 197 |
Sent Packing Again | 199 |
Crouching Tiger | 204 |
How the Leopard Got His Spots | 207 |
The Madness of Crowds | 209 |
Diamond Geezer | 212 |
The Three Laws of Robotics | 216 |
Thinking Outside the Box | 219 |
Googling in the Caribbean The Power of the Matrix | 222 |
Loss Aversion | 226 |
The Lead in Your Pencil | 228 |
Testing Spaghetti to Destruction | 230 |
The Gherkin | 232 |
Being Mean with the Price Index | 235 |
Omniscience can be a Liability | 238 |
Why People arent Cleverer | 240 |
The Man from Underground | 242 |
There are No Uninteresting Numbers | 244 |
Incognito | 246 |
The Ice Skating Paradox | 249 |
The Rule of Two | 252 |
Segregation and Micromotives | 254 |
Not Going with the Flow | 256 |
Venn Vill They Ever Learn | 258 |
Some Benefits of Irrationality | 261 |
Strange Formulae | 266 |
Chaos | 270 |
All Aboard | 273 |
The Global Village | 276 |
Notes | 279 |
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Common terms and phrases
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