Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

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It is a neat idea but I wish there had been some coherence to why these equations were chosen, over other ones or why it has to be 17 instead of the top 10 or the top 20? None of these equations emerged in a vacuum, Stewart shows; each drew, in some way, on past equations and the thinking of the day.

Importance: Once computers became powerful enough to approximately solve this equation, it opened up a complex and very useful field of physics. If you were a mathlete or have even the slightest interest in figures, Ian Stewart can bring the subject alive for you. The stories behind them — the people who discovered or invented them and the periods in which they lived — are fascinating. History: Robert May was the first to point out that this model of population growth could produce chaos in 1975.The final non-Mathematics equation is the Black-Scholes equation, which is hard to fuck up in that that equation is just smoke and mirrors to obscure the fact that the assholes running the financial sector don't outperform random number generators. The fact that it is written by an experienced, world renowned mathematician adds to my confidence in the book. I was struck by just how hard it is for experts - even excellent communicators like Stewart - to bring their explanations down to the level of their audience. Stewart has managed to produce a remarkably readable, informative and entertaining volume on a subject about which few are as well informed as they would like to be.

Around 250 BC Euclid became the first modern mathematician when he wrote his famous Elements, the most influential mathematical textbook ever. History: Joseph Fourier discovered the equation, which extended from his famous solution to a differential equation describing how heat flows, and the previously described wave equation.He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrödinger's cat.