100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World - Hardcover

The repetition in the title of this book captures its intriguing character: that knowledge about knowledge is itself knowledge, including what we don t know. John Barrow s focus is on the mathematical ideas that offer insight into what makes the world turn around. They crop up in everything from physics to politics and whet one s appetite for digging deeper [He] directs one s attention to their larger significance, leaving the reader to see the world with a new understanding. --Steven J. Brams, professor of politics, New York University"

Mathematics can reveal and illuminate things about the complex world we live in that can t be found any other way. In this hugely informative and entertaining book, John D. Barrow takes the most perplexing of everyday phenomena from the odds of winning the lottery and the method of determining batting averages to the shapes of roller coasters and the reasoning behind the fairest possible divorce settlements and explains why things work the way they do. With elementary math and accompanying illustrations, he sheds light on the mysterious corners of the world we encounter every day. Have you ever considered why you always seem to 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? This clever little book has all the answers to these puzzling, everyday questions of existence that need not perplex us anymore."