His wondrous world of worked-out maths and joined-up thinking is radical and even romantic -- Ian Finlayson ― Times

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Two sets of numbers and symbols separated by an equals sign really change the world? Yes! And not only that: they can reveal the laws of nature and unlock the secrets of the universe.

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Professor Ian Stewart shows how equations open new vistas of experience, from electronics and global communications to radar, lasers, space craft and the atom bomb. His narrative spans two and half millennia, from the ancient Greeks to the seductive formulation that recently guided the world's banking systems to near-oblivion. He shows how insights in one era often inform work centuries later: Pythogoras's theorem inspired Einstein and, yet more curiously, the stumbling calculations of a sixteenth-century gambler led to an impossible number that became a key to the baffling world of quantum physics.