Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
Writing Nature's Greatest Book
By Freeman Dyson
The Best of All Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny
by Ivar Ekeland
University of Chicago Press, 207 pp., $25.00
Ivar Ekeland has a Norwegian name and teaches at the University of British Columbia in Canada, but the style and spirit of his book are unmistakably French. The book is a rapid run through the history of the last four hundred years, seen through the eyes of a French mathematician. Mathematics appears as a unifying principle for history. Ekeland moves easily from mathematics to physics, biology, ethics, and philosophy. The central figure of his narrative is the French savant Pierre de Maupertuis (1698–1759), a man of many talents, who formulated the principle of least action in 1745 in a memoir with the title The Laws of Motion and Rest Deduced from a Metaphysical Principle. The principle of least action says that nature arranges all processes so as to minimize a quantity called action, which is a measure of the effort required to bring the processes to completion. The action of any mechanical motion is defined as the moving mass multiplied by the velocity and by the distance moved. Maupertuis was able to demonstrate mathematically that if a collection of objects moves in such a way as to make the total action as small as possible, then the movement obeys Newton's laws of motion. Thus the whole science of Newtonian mechanics follows from the principle of least action.
Review, 4088 words
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