Seventeen Equations that Changed the World

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He said that the Black–Scholes equation was the "mathematical justification for the trading"—and therefore—"one ingredient in a rich stew of financial irresponsibility, political ineptitude, perverse incentives and lax regulation" that contributed to the financial crisis of 2007–08. Tucked away behind the scenes, to be sure - but the influence was there, whether it was noticed it or not. Newton's law of gravitation describes the force of gravity between two objects, F, in terms of a universal constant, G, the masses of the two objects, m 1 and m 2, and the distance between the objects, r. Ian Stewart takes us on a journey from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond which I found at times fascinating, at times frustrating. An interesting idea, but I found the book to be so badly written that it didn't really hold my attention.

Wir können froh sein, dass es neben uns Individuen, andere Individuen gibt, die uns diesen Glauben durch Bestätigung erhalten. The Midas Formula (Black-Scholes Equation) for investment modeling, was analyzed in how it led to the equation winning the Nobel Prize, to only then be greatly misused without full understanding, and thus leading to the banking debacle of the current century.The section on the Schrodinger equation, for example, is presented in such a way that it's almost impossible to understand what he's on about, throwing around terms like the Hamiltonian and eigenfunctions without ever giving enough information to follow the description of what is happening. The final non-Mathematics equation is the Black-Scholes equation, which is hard to fuck up in that that equation is just smoke and mirrors to obscure the fact that the assholes running the financial sector don't outperform random number generators. However, I found it quite hard to read at times, despite having a statistical/mathematical background. Around 250 BC Euclid became the first modern mathematician when he wrote his famous Elements, the most influential mathematical textbook ever.

The wave equation describes the behavior of waves — a vibrating guitar string, ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown, or light coming out of an incandescent bulb. He even suggests at one point that hedge fund managers might somehow "influence market conditions to make [mortgage] defaults more likely. Stewart's explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its ramifications were extremely lucid, and his discussion right on target. As a final twist, the accuracy of the entire survey can be checked by measuring one of the final sides directly.Some of the chapters were pretty basic, some were quite complicated, especially the quantum mathematical ones. Then we choose a prominent point in the landscape that is visible from both ends of the baseline, and measure the angle from the baseline to that point, at both ends of the baseline. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. As well as positive stories, Stewart is not afraid to show where mis-interpretation of the mathematics or its limitations has failed us, most notably in the last chapter on financial derivatives and how their abuse has caused the current crises. 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.