Impossible? : surprising solutions to counterintuitive conundrums
Whenever Forty-second Street in New York is temporarily closed, traffic doesn't gridlock but flows more smoothly - why is that? Or consider that cities that build new roads can experience dramatic increases in traffic congestion - how is this possible? What does the game show Let's Make A Deal reveal about the unexpected hazards of decision-making? What can the game of cricket teach us about the surprising behavior of the law of averages? These are some of the counterintuitive mathematical occurrences that readers encounter in Impossible? Havil ventures further than ever into territory where intuition can lead one astray. He gathers entertaining problems from probability and statistics along with an eclectic variety of conundrums and puzzlers from other areas of mathematics, including classics of abstract math like the Banach-Tarski paradox. These problems range in difficulty from easy to highly challenging, yet they can be tackled by anyone with a background in calculus. And the fascinating history and personalities associated with many of the problems are included with their mathematical proofs. Impossible? will delight anyone who wants to have their reason thoroughly confounded in the most astonishing and unpredictable ways--Publisher's description
Print Book, English, 2011
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 2011
Nonfiction
xii, 235 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780691150024, 9780691131313, 0691150028, 0691131317
181142150
It's common knowledge
Simpson's paradox
The impossible problem
Braess's paradox
The power of complex numbers
Bucking the odds
Cantor's paradise
Gamow-Stern elevators
The toss of a coin
Wild-card poker
Two series
Two card tricks
The spin of a needle
The best choice
The power of powers
Benford's law
Goodstein sequences
The Banach-Tarski paradox
books.google.com Additional Information at Google Books