Whenever we contemplate the advancements achieved by humanity, we envision grand-scale undertakings such as towering skyscrapers piercing the clouds, the International Space Station, the atomic bomb, automated factories, self-driving vehicles, and the colossal Three Gorges Dam.
In essence, our minds gravitate towards tangible, visible, and immense objects.
I invite you to ponder the underlying foundations of these accomplishments: I present to you a select (and incomplete!) list of equations that have revolutionised our perception of the world and enhanced our understanding of everything around us.
Many of these equations remain unfamiliar to the general public, yet each has profoundly influenced entire fields of thought, enabling the realisation of humanity’s greatest feats.
Each equation is the culmination of countless hours spent by a solitary individual, seated at a modest desk, pondering deep concepts and ultimately committing their thoughts to paper in the form of a few symbolic notations!
1 – 530 BC – Pythagorean theorem
2 – 1610 – Logarithms – J. Napier
3 – 1668 – Calculus – Newton
4 – 1750 – The square root of -1 – Euler
5 – 1810 – The normal distribution – C. F. Gauss
6 – 1822 – Fourier transforms – J. Fourier
7 – 1845 – Navier-Stokes equations – C. Navier/G. Stokes
8 – 1905 – Relativity – Einstein
9 – 1975 – Chaos theory – R. May