Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

Ian Stewart shows how equations open new vistas of experience, from electronics and global communications to radar, lasers, space craft and the atom bomb. His narative spans two and a half millennia, from the ancient Greeks to the ... formulation that recently guided the world's banking systems to near-oblivion. He show how insights in one era often inform work centuries later: Pythagoras's theorem inspired [Albert] Einstein and, yet more curiously, the stumbling calculations of a sixteenth century gambler [Girolamo Cardano] led to an impossible number that became a key to the baffling world of quantum physics.