Come dicevo, non è di facile lettura per chi non ha avuto a che fare, almeno minimamente, con equazioni e concetti matematici e fisici; alcune volte era necessario rileggere una volta in più per riuscire a cogliere le nozioni e i concetti proposti. Auch Mathematiker*innen (so wie ich es eine bin) können beim Lesen des Buches noch etwas lernen - mir waren ca drei Viertel der Formeln bekannt, aber ihr historischer Kontext und ihre gesellschaftlichen Implikationen nicht unbedingt. History: Isaac Newton derived his laws based on earlier astronomical and mathematical work by Johannes Kepler. History: Michael Faraday did pioneering work on the connection between electricity and magnetism, and James Clerk Maxwell translated it into these equations.

The Black–Scholes equation changed the world by creating a booming quadrillion-dollar industry; its generalisations, used unintelligently by a small coterie of bankers, changed the world again by contributing to a multitrillion-dollar financial crash whose ever more malign effects, now extending to entire national economics, are still being felt worldwide. As we will see, however, modern physics relies on a quantum mechanical explanation of electromagnetismTo calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. The Wave Equation is one of the most important equations in physics, and is crucial for engineers studying the vibrations in vehicles and the response of buildings to earthquakes.

However, I found it quite hard to read at times, despite having a statistical/mathematical background. Within each triangle, observe the angles to all noteworthy features – church towers, crossroads, and so on. Ian Stewart stellt hier 17 mathematische Formeln, ihren jeweiligen historischen Hintergrund, das Teilgebiet der Mathematik, aus dem sie entstanden oder das sie begründeten, ihre (mathematische) Bedeutung und die naturwissenschaftlichen, technologischen, gesellschaftlichen oder politischen Implikationen vor.Overall, I'm glad to have read it and it taught me some new things and reminded me of some things I learned in the past. But his publishers had a point too: equations are formal and austere, they look complicated, and even those of us who love equations can be put off if we are bombarded with them.

Knowing the distance between them, he could work out the size of the Earth, which he published in his Eratosthenes Batavus (‘The Dutch Eratosthenes’) in 1617. Das macht dieses Buch thematisch sehr umfangreich: man bekommt einen Einblick in Analysis, Topologie, Stochastik und mathematische Physik, während die gesellschaftlichen Implikationen von DNA-Entschlüsselung und digitaler Bildbearbeitung zum Klimawandel und der Finanzkrise von 2008 reichen. The equals sign is unusual because it dates back more than 450 years, yet we not only know who invented it, we even know why. Stewart provides the "historical background" to explain "how the equation was anticipated", how people then "generalized the ideas and formalized the results". The left side is the acceleration of a small amount of fluid, the right indicates the forces that act upon it.But I can imagine that for a non-math/science major, this book would be quite problematic and quite unclear. History: The initial work was by Blaise Pascal, but the distribution came into its own with Bernoulli. He built a conceptual tower whose foundations were points, lines, and circles, and whose pinnacle was the existence of precisely five regular solids.