Ten Equations That Rule the World

Empowering and illuminating, The Ten Equations That Rule the World shows how math really can change your life.

Is there a secret formula for getting rich? For going viral? For deciding how long to stick with your current job, Netflix series, or even relationship?

This book is all about the equations that make our world go round. Ten of them, in fact. They are integral to everything from investment banking to betting companies and social media giants. And they can help you to increase your chance of success, guard against financial loss, live more healthfully, and see through scaremongering. They are known by only the privileged few―until now.

With wit and clarity, mathematician David Sumpter shows that it isn't the technical details that make these formulas so successful. It is the way they allow mathematicians to view problems from a different angle―a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn.

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, where he runs the Collective Behaviour Research Group. Originally from London, he studied his PhD in Mathematics at Manchester and held academic research positions at both Oxford and Cambridge before heading to Sweden, where he lives with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he trains a successful 9-year old boys' football team, Uppsala IF 2005.

An incomplete list of the applied maths research projects on which David has worked includes pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; clapping undergraduate students in the north of England; the traffic of Cuban leaf-cutter ants; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; swarms of locusts traveling across the Sahara; disease-spread in Ugandan villages; the gaze of London commuters; dancing honey bees from Sydney; and the tubular structures built by Japanese slime moulds. His research has appeared in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society, among many others.