The Ten Equations That Rule the World: And How You Can Use Them Too by David Sumpter

Author:David Sumpter [Sumpter, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241404553
Google: X0C2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2020-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

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In a couple of years Lina and Michaela, who both plan to become maths teachers, will be explaining to teenagers how the algorithms inside their telephone filter their view of the world. For most of the kids, this lesson will help them deal with the complex social network they find themselves embedded in. But a small group of their students will see another possibility – a potential career. They will study hard, understand the maths in more depth and learn how to apply the algorithms used by Google, Instagram and others. A few of these kids might go further still and become part of the rich and powerful elite who control how the information is presented to us.

In 2001, the co-founder of Google, Larry Page, had a patent approved for the use of Equation 5 in Internet searches.10 The patent was initially owned by Stanford University, where Page was working at the time, and was bought by Google in exchange for 1.8 million shares in the company. Stanford sold the shares for $336 million in 2005. They would have been worth ten times that amount today. The application of Equation 5 is just one of many patents owned by Google, Facebook and Yahoo for the application of twentieth-century mathematics to the Internet. Graph theory is worth billions to the tech giants who have harnessed it.

That mathematical formulae produced almost one hundred years before these patents were filed can be owned by a university or a company seems to go against the spirit of TEN. The members have always had secrets, but those secrets have usually been shared and used by anyone who wants to learn them. Surely the society should have principles that prevent its members ring-fencing their discoveries or making excessive profits from their carefully collated knowledge?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is far from obvious …

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