About the Author

Dr Michael Guillen teaches physics and mathematics in the Core Curriculum Program at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, and now lives just outside Boston.

Reviews

'The eponymous mathematical syntheses are his personal selection of what we might call 'equations every educated person ought to know'. His objective is to chronicle their discovery, introduce the individual who had the inspiration, and outline their significance and their consequences for the world today. It is a worthy aim ... the tales are well worth the telling' IRISH TIMES'Guillen packs a lot of fact into his story of five greats' NEW SCIENTIST

Harvard mathematician-physicist Guillen, who explored the human side of mathematics in Bridges to Infinity, now profiles five pioneers whose mathematical equations had far-reaching impacts. This seamless blend of dramatic biography and mathematical documentary links the personal with the scientific. For example, Swiss physicist Daniel Bernoulli, whose hydrodynamic equation led ultimately to the airplane, quit mathematics in disgust with his seemingly pointless career after his jealous father plagiarized his fluid-flow equations. Isaac Newton, whose understanding of gravitational attraction between objects made possible the landing of a human on the moon, was impelled to high achievement partly by an obsessive desire for vindication and revenge against a classroom bully. German physicist Rudolf Clausius, whose wife, Adelheid, died giving birth in 1875, saw life as an ultimately futile contest for survival; his law of entropy, or irreversible energy dissipation, explains a universe in which everything‘cells, organisms, galaxies‘eventually ages and dies. Also here are British chemist Michael Faraday, father of the electrical age, and Albert Einstein, who rued his decision to encourage Roosevelt to build atomic bombs. A wholly accessible, beautifully written exploration of the potent mathematical imagination. (Sept.)