Algunas partes requieren una lectura atenta y disciplinada y otras requerirán echar una mirada a capítulos precedentes para refrescar las nociones, ya que muchas ecuaciones se construyen a partir de ideas y conceptos ya presentados a los que el autor no vuelve. Inevitably, to give the book real world interest, many of the equations are from science, and Stewart proves, if anything, better at getting across the science than he is the maths (probably because it is easier to grasp the point). The square root of -1, usually written i, completes this process, giving rise to the complex numbers. That chapter just feels like it was only written so Stewart could vent his frustrations regarding the most recent real estate bubble, which, to be honest, is fair enough.

A logarithm for a particular base tells you what power you need to raise that base to to get a number. There's been a trend for a couple of years in popular science to produce 'n greatest ideas' type books, the written equivalent of those interminable '50 best musicals' or '100 favourite comedy moments' or whatever shows that certain TV companies churn out. It can be read from cover-to-cover, but each chapter can stand alone, so the book can be used for reference purposes. The Navier-Stokes equations describes the behavior of flowing fluids — water moving through a pipe, milk being mixed into coffee, air flow over an airplane wing, or smoke rising from a cigarette.

He even suggests at one point that hedge fund managers might somehow "influence market conditions to make [mortgage] defaults more likely. The reviewer, a mathematician, said that Stewart was "generally successful in getting the essential points across in a nontechnical way without too much distortion.

The fact that it is written by an experienced, world renowned mathematician adds to my confidence in the book. 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. For example, a right triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere need not follow the Pythagorean theorem. ecuaciones que cambiaron el mundo no es un libro fácil en la medida en que su público potencial seremos lectores sin formación matemática profunda. If "regular" people read this chapter and fully understood it, they would (and should) become enraged over what has happened and continues to happen.What Stewart does, as he does with the other 16 equations, formulas and mathematical ideas, is to give the historical development of logarithms, describes how they function, describe how they are useful and describes their various important applications in our daily lives. But there is always a small chance that purely randomly, say a mixture of gas molecules will partly unmix. Paul Coxon's twitter account by mathematics tutor and blogger Larry Phillips that summarizes the equations. Unfortunately, I doubt that most students would have the necessary sophistication to fully understand many of the concepts in this book.

If you're a skilled mathematician you will gloss over the maths and still take value from the following discussions. Seemingly basic equations have enabled us to predict eclipses, engineer earthquake-proof buildings, and invent the refrigerator. He gives a fascinating explanation of how Newton's laws, when extended to three-body problems, are still used by NASA to calculate the best route from Earth to Mars and have laid the basis for chaos theory.Having majored in electrical engineering, I found the chapter covering information theory particularly refreshing. There was no overarching theme other than each one is important, nor did I feel was there any attempt to flow from equation to equation. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrödinger's cat. The Shannon entropy of a message represents a lower bound on how much that message can be compressed without losing some of its content.