Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And
pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of
all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates
the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable
and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and
theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could
provide the answer.
This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland here takes the reader on a
journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible
worlds. He begins with the French physicist Maupertuis, whose least
action principle asserted that everything in nature occurs in the way
that requires the least possible action. This idea, Ekeland shows, was a
pivotal breakthrough in mathematics, because it was the first expression
of the concept of optimization, or the creation of systems that are
the most efficient or functional. Although the least action principle
was later elaborated on and overshadowed by the theories of Leonhard
Euler and Gottfried Leibniz, the concept of optimization that emerged
from it is an important one that touches virtually every scientific
discipline today.
Tracing the profound impact of optimization and the unexpected ways in
which it has influenced the study of mathematics, biology, economics,
and even politics, Ekeland reveals throughout how the idea of
optimization has driven some of our greatest intellectual breakthroughs.
The result is a dazzling display of erudition--one that will be
essential reading for popular-science buffs and historians of science
alike.
