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The unplanned impact of mathematics (2011)

Peter Rowlett introduces seven little-known tales illustrating that theoretical work may lead to practical applications, but it can't be forced and it can take centuries.

Reasons for believing in an explosive origin to the Universe, the Big Bang, were put forward by Aleksander Friedmann in his 1922 study of Einstein's field equations in a cosmological context. Beginning in the eighteenth century, companies began their current practice of selling as many policies as possible, because, as Bernoulli's law of large numbers showed, the bigger the volume, the more likely their predictions are to be accurate. But it was Joseph Fourier, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who recognized the great practical utility of these series in heat conduction and began to develop a general theory.

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