Modulbeschreibung

SHST

1

The main goal of this module is to show what kind of interaction there is between culture and society and science and technology. To this end, the recent and powerful ideas of science and technology are presented during the lectures and the students will apply these ideas to real world problems during the practice session. There they will see how these ideas have shaped the world we live in and how the world the innovators were living in during their discoveries influenced their thought and approaches to particular problems. At the end of the module the students will have a much better appreciation for the achievements of these innovators in science and technology and furthermore will be able to place their own work within a much larger framework.

• Week    1    The development of calculus more than 350 years ago
• Week    2    Newton’s law of gravity explains the motion of the stars
• Week    3    The invention of imaginary numbers improves almost all of engineering
• Week    4    The Gaussian distribution is everywhere and is the bedrock of statistics
• Week    5    From traffic jams to music, waves describe the world
• Week    6    Interpreting the world in the frequency domain allows for new insights
• Week    7    Navier-Stokes explain the mechanics of fluids
• Week    8    The secret of electromagnetic waves is unlocked by Maxwell
• Week    9    The 2nd law of thermodynamics dominates everything in the long run
• Week    10    Relativity theory has changed our understanding of the universe
• Week    11    Quantum mechanics is strange but apparently true
• Week    12    Information theory is at the heart of the Internet
• Week    13    Chaos theory clearly shows that not all is predictable
• Week    14    The Black-Scholes equation gives us a handle on the financial markets

Required Book: “17 Equations that changed the world” by Ian Steward

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