Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

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The New York Book Review said that Stewart was a "genius in the way he conveys his excitement and sense of wonder across" who has a "valuable grasp" of "what it takes to make equations interesting" and "to make science cool. He built a conceptual tower whose foundations were points, lines, and circles, and whose pinnacle was the existence of precisely five regular solids. The populist banker bashing this chapter represented made me seriously question the accuracy of the detail in the other chapters. No es el libro perfecto ni tampoco el más completo, pero es una lectura que elucida satisfactoriamente los puntos que presenta y que, trazando una línea a través de ellos, logra dibujar la silueta de la disciplina que, por pureza y claridad, quizá sea la más apasionante y seductora de todo el conocimiento humano. Algebra works perfectly the way we want it to — any equation has a complex number solution, a situation that is not true for the real numbers : x 2 + 4 = 0 has no real number solution, but it does have a complex solution: the square root of -4, or 2 i.

Calculus can be extended to the complex numbers, and by doing so, we find some amazing symmetries and properties of these numbers. The left side is the acceleration of a small amount of fluid, the right indicates the forces that act upon it. The Fourier transform is at the heart of modern signal processing and analysis, and data compression. However, equations have a reputation for being scary: Stephen Hawking’s publishers told him that every equation would halve the sales of A Brief History of Time.The reviewer, a mathematician, said that Stewart was "generally successful in getting the essential points across in a nontechnical way without too much distortion. He gives a fascinating explanation of how Newton's laws, when extended to three-body problems, are still used by NASA to calculate the best route from Earth to Mars and have laid the basis for chaos theory. If students were introduced to the applications, meanings and ideas behind the Maths they are taught at school at an earlier age via Stewart's book then maybe there would be a greater passion developed amongst adolescents to study it further and realise its importance in understanding the world around us.

I also always get really irritated with knot theory, as the first thing mathematicians do is say 'Let's join the ends up. For example, we can think of velocity, or speed, as being the derivative of position — if you are walking at 3 miles per hour, then every hour, you have changed your position by 3 miles.

In the introduction to his book, 17 Equations That Changed the World, Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, explains the power and beauty behind these mathematical calculations. French engineer Claude-Louis Navier and Irish mathematician George Stokes made the leap to the model still used today. An approachable, lively, and informative guide to the mathematical building blocks of modern life, In Pursuit of the Unknown is a penetrating exploration of how we have also used equations to make sense of, and in turn influence, our world. In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World is an elegant argument for why equations matter.