Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

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An interesting idea, but I found the book to be so badly written that it didn't really hold my attention. He is an Emeritus Professor and Digital Media Fellow in the Mathematics Department at the University of Warwick, with special responsibility for public awareness of mathematics and science. I have an advantage over school math teachers: I'm not trying to show you how to do the sums yourself. Most of the equations discussed are from Physics, and a lot of the time it's pretty obvious Stewart is writing outside of his field there—he's probably exactly the wrong person to be writing about the implications of the Copenhagen interpretation. I would love this book to become required reading at, say, the upper high school and/or college level, as I think it could help with this necessary deeper understanding of the relevance of mathematics.

He explained that anyone can "appreciate the beauty and importance of equations without knowing how to solve them . This is a differential equation, or an equation that describes how a property is changing through time in terms of that property's derivative, as above.But I can imagine that for a non-math/science major, this book would be quite problematic and quite unclear. A neat idea this, to sum up the history of human attempts to explain the physical world in 17 equations. To understand a lot of the equations in this book it would be helpful to know something about calculus or other higher level maths. History: Robert May was the first to point out that this model of population growth could produce chaos in 1975. Modern use: Topology is used to understand the behavior and function of DNA, and it is an underlying part of the mathematical tool kit used to understand networks like social media and the internet.

History: Though attributed to Pythagoras, it is not certain that he was the first person to prove it. This was the only equation I was unfamiliar with, and for a very good reason: it relates to Finance, and financial derivatives in particular. 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.

Paul Coxon's twitter account by mathematics tutor and blogger Larry Phillips that summarizes the equations. Importance: According to Stewart, "More than any other mathematical technique, it has created the modern world.

He often refers to things in today's society that are relevant to the equation and its consequences. James Clerk Maxwell transformed early experimental observations and empirical laws about magnetism and electricity into a system of equations for electromagnetism. History: Calculus as we currently know it was described around the same time in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. The normal probability distribution, which has the familiar bell curve graph above, is ubiquitous in statistics.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. And the equation at the heart of Information Theory, devised by Claude Shannon, is the basis of digital communication today.

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. Importance: Fundamental to the development of topology, which extends geometry to any continuous surface. Naturally, much of science is interested in understanding how things change, and the derivative and the integral — the other foundation of calculus — sit at the heart of how mathematicians and scientists understand change. Important work by mathematicians Vladimir Arnold and Stephen Smale helped with the realization that chaos is a consequence of differential equations. Within each triangle, observe the angles to all noteworthy features – church towers, crossroads, and so on.One kind presents relations between various mathematical quantities: the task is to prove the equation is true. Since nowadays you can do an A level in Physics without studying calculus it seems that this book can only be aimed at undergraduate students or people who have studied these interesting areas. Since the book is broken up into these chunks it's very easy to read, and the concepts are made quite accessible while still being explained in great depth.