Amazon.com (ISBN 0471379077, Paperback)

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