“I’ll meet you at the Bobby Robson statue”

“We’ll be outside Crown Pools”

“In between Christchurch Park and the Regent Theatre”

Like most of the directions that we give each other, the instructions above depend on local knowledge to create a shared point of reference. This can be difficult when directing somebody that you’ve never met, and additionally can sometimes not be understood by a computer or non-native English speaker.

Happily however, we can now direct customers to Ipswich Tuition Centre using What3Words ///fact.boat.rocks

What3Words is a British start-up founded 9 years ago by a developer in rural Hertfordshire who couldn’t be found by delivery drivers. Coordinates using latitude and longitude are incredibly accurate, but they require 16 digits and have never been widely adopted by the public or business community. Instead w3w inventor Chris Sheldrick uses three words that divide the world into 3m x 3m squares so that the postman can find your front door.

The Mathematics

As ever at Ipswich Tuition Centre we are very interested in the mathematics of a resource. The total surface area of the earth is 510 million square kilometres (or 1,969,000 square miles). If the earth was a perfect sphere you could calculate this using one of our GCSE formulae 4/3 x pi x radius squared. However did you know that the earth is actually a flattened sphere? Read more here.

There are 40000 words in the English language, and when we use combinations of three words we have 64 trillion possible combinations (40000 x 40000 x 40000). Ideally you need 57 trillion combinations to cover an area of 510 million square kilometres in squares of 3m x 3m (or 10feet x 10feet).

Go ahead and try it; the What3Words app is free to download and use, or you can visit the What3Words website. Find Ipswich Tuition Centre at ///fact.boat.rocks or you can find a number of London’s key attractions here.

References:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/subaru-is-latest-car-maker-to-use-what3words-for-in-car-navigation/

https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/303132/what-is-what3words