Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

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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. Even though it was later supplanted by Einstein's theory of relativity, it is still essential for a practical description of how objects in space, like stars, planets, and human-made spacecraft, interact with each other. An entertaining and illuminating collection of curious facts and histories suitable for random dipping-in or reading straight through. The square root of -1, usually written i, completes this process, giving rise to the complex numbers.

None of these equations emerged in a vacuum, Stewart shows; each drew, in some way, on past equations and the thinking of the day. When surveying a stretch of land, be it a building site or a country, the main practical consideration is that it is much easier to measure angles than it is to measure distances. He chose these towns because they lay on the same line of longitude and were exactly one degree of arc apart.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Triangulation lets us measure a few distances and lots of angles; then everything else follows from the trigonometric equations. However, perhaps someone could teach a mathematics course with this as a supplementary text, with the necessary "translation" being performed by the teacher. This was the only equation I was unfamiliar with, and for a very good reason: it relates to Finance, and financial derivatives in particular.

Maxwell's equations were for classical electromagnetism what Newton's laws of motion were for classical mechanics.The techniques developed to solve the wave equation have been very useful in solving similar types of equations as well. 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. Ian Stewart takes us on a journey from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond which I found at times fascinating, at times frustrating.