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| Photo: Steven Strogatz |
The following is an excerpt of Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz.
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| Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe |
Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, computers, or microwave ovens. We wouldn’t have radio. Or television. Or ultrasound for expectant mothers, or GPS for lost travelers. We wouldn’t have split the atom, unraveled the human genome, or put astronauts on the moon. We might not even have the Declaration of Independence.
It’s a curiosity of history that the world was changed forever by an arcane branch of mathematics. How could it be that a theory originally about shapes ultimately reshaped civilization?
The essence of the answer lies in a quip that the physicist Richard Feynman made to the novelist Herman Wouk when they were discussing the Manhattan Project. Wouk was doing research for a big novel he hoped to write about World War II, and he went to Caltech to interview physicists who had worked on the bomb, one of whom was Feynman. After the interview, as they were parting, Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn’t. “You had better learn it,” said Feynman. “It’s the language God talks.”
For reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. Maybe God made it that way. Or maybe it’s the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can’t harbor life intelligent enough to ask the question. In any case, it’s a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations...
The World According To Calculus
As should be obvious by now, I’ll be giving an applied mathematician’s take on the story and significance of calculus. A historian of mathematics would tell it differently. So would a pure mathematician. What fascinates me as an applied mathematician is the push and pull between the real world around us and the ideal world in our heads. Phenomena out there guide the mathematical questions we ask; conversely, the math we imagine sometimes foreshadows what actually happens out there in reality. When it does, the effect is uncanny.
To be an applied mathematician is to be outward-looking and intellectually promiscuous. To those in my field, math is not a pristine, hermetically sealed world of theorems and proofs echoing back on themselves. We embrace all kinds of subjects: philosophy, politics, science, history, medicine, all of it. That’s the story I want to tell—the world according to calculus.
This is a much broader view of calculus than usual. It encompasses the many cousins and spinoffs of calculus, both within mathematics and in the adjacent disciplines.
Read more...
Recommending Listen
Calculus underpins many of the greatest ideas about how the universe works: Newton’s Laws, Maxwell’s Equations, quantum theory. It’s been used to develop ubiquitous technologies, like GPS. It was even used to model the battle between HIV and the human immune system, which helped researchers fine tune triple-drug therapies to combat the virus.
Source: Science Friday
