Five Equations That Changed The World: The Power And Poetry Of Mathematics

Good book, fantastic seller. A must read for any engineer, as it is very interesting, and for such a low price, excellent.

Well written, researched book. You have read so much science facts in school. But the stories of the people behind these discoveries are amazing. Love the author’s writing style and research.

This book is one of the best about the subject I’ve ever read

I would love to have persevered with the book, but it’s hard to take seriously a scholarly work that doesn’t know the difference between the 17th-century King Charles I of the English Civil War and the 11th-century William I, ie William the Conqueror. How can somebody involved in the book’s production not have spotted this?

You might characterize this book along the lines of “an opera book for people who think they don’t like opera.” The author, Dr. Michael Guillen, sets himself the formidable task of instilling into non-mathematicians an appreciation of the beauty and glory of mathematical equations. His approach is to take five historical figures, give a brief biography of each, select an equation best encapsulating their accomplishments, and explain this equation’s relevance for contemporary society. The figures selected are Isaac Newton, Daniel Bernoulli, Michael Faraday, Rudolph Clausius, and Albert Einstein.
Is his format a good choice? Yes, perhaps among the best. Are the historical figures good choices? Yes again; but here one might quibble a bit: all the figures selected are male physicists who lived during the approximately 300-year time-span, 1640-1950. Were there no important equations prior to this? What about the Pythagorean theorem? Euclid’s proof of the infinity of primes? Archimedes’s formula for pi? The delFerro-Tartaglia-Cardano equations for the cubic? What about women?
Is his approach successful? Generally speaking, yes. It is not clear what readership Guillen has in mind. At first I though it might be your typical Scientific American reader. But the biographies tend toward a Horatio-Alger style, suggesting a younger audience.
Dr. Guillen’s unique talent is his understanding of the relationship between religion and science. Although he treats the subject only briefly, I have never seen a better exposition in readily accessible material. As Guillen points out, this relationship has not always been favorable to religion. A comparison with the proverbial ingrate camel comes to mind: having inveigled its nose into the tent, the camel proceeds to evict the original tenants. This process began with Plato’s plea that science be allowed to investigate the celestial realm (at that time considered the province of the gods), and ended with Laplace’s claim he had no need of the “God hypothesis.”
Although I liked the book as a whole and applaud Dr. Guillan’s effort, the book is unfortunately marred by some careless and misleading passages. I cite some in the hope these might be corrected in a future edition.
Page 58: “…a giant titanium bullet” – the Apollo capsule was made mainly of aluminum, not titanium.
Page 61: “As the rocket thundered its way to the clouds it began to spin like a bullet” – not so! Small rockets are sometimes “spin stabilized,” but never large rockets like Apollo.
Page 61: “… the spaceship started to speed up …the astronaut’s had reached the point at which the moon’s gravity was stronger than the earth’s” – because the moon is a moving target, the minimum spacecraft speed along the trajectory does not occur at the point where the two gravities cancel.
Page 137: “He discovered that the force between [two magnets] diminished with the square of their separation” – Magnets always have two poles, so the force between them is complicated. For large separations the force diminished with the fourth-power of the separation.
Page 259: ” … letting out a hundred billion times more energy than one could ever get from ordinary, old-fashioned combustion” – the ratio is more like ten million.

Michael Guillen books reminds me of Issac Asimov. A great scientist who is also an excellent author. He is able to explain complex concepts in a way that anyone can understand. He also examined the personalities of the five scientists and the world they lived in. Even though I have learned about Einstein and his equations for many years, he presented additional insights that I had not previously understood. I had one of those “Ah ha! So that that is how it works. ” moments.
I look forward to reading his new book; “The Null Prophecy”.