Ian Stewart’s Numbers of Nature
Nature’s Numbers by Ian Stewart is worth reading for everyone.
Ian Stewart is the author of over sixty books. In a very lucid style he explains the complicated mathematics found in nature to a layman.
He writes the well-known ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in the famous ‘Scientific American’ magazine.
For non-mathematical readers, the book is a blessing.
The book consists of nine chapters, namely, The natural order, What mathematics is for, What mathematics is about, The constants of change, From violins to videos, Broken symmetry, The rhythm of life, God plays to dice, Drops, Dynamics and Daisies. . All chapters have very interesting examples.
In chapter one entitled, Natural Order, the author explains the surprising facts about patterns found in nature. In almost all flowers, the number of petals is one of the numbers that occur in the strange sequence 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89.
The great scientist Kepler discovered that if you take the cube of any planet’s distance from the Sun and divide it by the square of its orbital period, you always get the same number. It was the same for all six planets!
Io, Europa, and Ganymede are three of Jupiter’s largest satellites. They orbit the planet at, respectively, 1.77. 3.55 and 7.16 days. Each of these numbers is almost exactly twice the previous one. There is a significant pattern.
It is interesting to note about the Ship/Dock theorem. That is, if you want to change the word ship to the word dock by changing one letter at a time and getting a valid word at each stage, you will find that all the solutions have one thing in common: at least one of the words in between must contain two vowels. . Readers will be motivated to do this puzzle on their own to find out the result.
The rhythm of life is wonderful. In nature everything is rhythmic! There are numerous examples given in the chapter ‘The Rhythm of Life’. The author analyzes the theory of chaos in the chapter ‘Play dice with God’.
There is a list of additional reading books for those who are interested in learning more about the secrets of nature.
It is highly recommended that everyone read this book to understand the secrets of nature or rather the secrets of God!