The old saying goes, “Time and tide wait for no man.” In today's society, an equally apt line might be, “Everyone waits for almost everything.” This widespread experience with waiting lends a marvelous opportunity to develop some very nice mathematics and apply it to problems with which our students can easily identify. In this art icle, we shall consider several mathematical models that can be used to study different waiting situations. The mathematics used involves just simple ideas from probability and mathematical expectation. Some related ideas are given in Mathers (1976). We shall also consider how computer simulations can be introduced to bring an added dimension to these topics. Most important, we shall see how such mathematical ideas furnish an ideal vehicle for involving students in actual individual research projects to collect real-life data, analyze it, and compare the results to predictions based on the mathematical model.
