Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics ANNOTATION
From the popular science editor of ABC's Good Morning America, this is the story behind five mathematical equations that have shaped the modern world. As told by Dr. Guillen, the stories behind the creation of these formulas are not only chronicles of science, but also gripping dramas of jealousy, fame, war, and discovery. Author media.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Five Equations That Changed the World, Dr. Michael Guillen, known to millions as the Science Editor on ABC-TV's Good Morning America, tells the amazing stories of the people and discoveries that led to the five most powerful and important scientific achievements in human history. In doing so, Dr. Guillen reveals in simple, everyday language the secret world of mathematics. It was through the brilliance of these five fascinating people: a sickly love-starved loner; an emotionally abused prodigy from a dysfunctional family; a religious, poverty-stricken illiterate; a soft-spoken widower living in perilous times; and a smart-alecky high-school dropout - that we were able to harness the power of electricity, fly in airplanes, land astronauts on the moon, build a nuclear bomb, and understand the mortality of all life on Earth.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Harvard mathematician Guillen looks at five mathematical breakthroughs and the theorists behind them, among them Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Guillen, an instructor in physics and mathematics at Harvard, devotes this work to discussions of five significant equations in physics and the individuals who developed them. The individuals are Issac Newton (universal gravitation), Daniel Bernoulli (hydrodynamic pressure), Michael Faraday (thermodynamics), Rudolf Clausius (thermodynamics), and Albert Einstein (special relativity). Guillen sets their work in the context of the science of their times with accounts that are obviously fictionalized, containing many purported conversations and private thoughts of the physicists in question. The prose is quite purplish in places, and the matters of fact and interpretation are often questionable if not outright wrong. Not recommended for most libraries.-Jack W. Weigel, Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor
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