17 Equations that Changed the World by Ian Stewart

Two sets of numbers and symbols separated by an equals sign can change the world. And not only that: they can reveal the laws of nature and unlock the secrets of the universe.

Professor Ian Stewart shows how seventeen extraordinary equations have opened new areas of experience, from electronics and global communications to radar, lasers, space craft and the atom bomb. His narrative spans two and half millennia, from the ancient Greeks to the seductive formulation that led the world’s banking systems to near-oblivion. He shows how insights from the past can inform work centuries later: Pythagoras’s theorem inspired Einstein and, yet more curiously, the stumbling calculations of a sixteenth-century gambler led to an impossible number that became a key to the baffling world of quantum physics.

‘He has not only what it takes to make equations interesting, but also to make science cool’