Nature’s Numbers by Ian Stewart (1995).

Stewart writes in a marvelously clear style but, more importantly, he is interesting: he sees the world in
an interesting way, in a mathematical way, and manages to convey the wonder and strangeness and powerful
insights which seeing the world in terms of patterns and shapes, numbers and math, gives you. He wants to
help us see the world as a mathematician sees it, full of clues and information which can lead us to deeper and
deeper appreciation of the patterns and harmonies all around us. It makes for a wonderfully illuminating read.

 The Constants of Change

Newton’s basic insight was that changes in nature can be described by mathematical processes. Stewart
explains how detailed consideration of what happens to a cannonball fired out of a cannon helps us towards
Newton’s fundamental law, that force = mass x acceleration.

Example:
The cannonball's motion in the horizontal direction, parallel to
the ground, is very simple it takes place at a constant speed. Its
motion in the vertical direction is more interesting. It starts moving
upward quite rapidly, then it slows down. until for a split second it
appears to hang stationary in the air: then it begins to drop, slowly at
first but with rapidly increasing velocity. Newton's insight was that
although the position of the cannonball changes in quite a complex
way, its velocity changes in a much simpler way, and its acceleration
varies in a very simple manner indeed. Figure 2 summarizes the
relationship between these three functions, in the following example
Suppose for the sake of illustration that the initial upward
velocity is fifty meters per second (50 m/sec). Then the height of the
cannonball above ground. at one-second intervals, is:
0. 45. 80. 105, 120, 125, 120, 105, 80, 45. 0.
Conclusion:
You can see from these numbers that the ball goes up levels
off near the top and then goes down again. But the general pattern is
not entirely obvious. The difficulty was compounded in Galileo's time-
and, indeed, in Newton's- because it was hard to measure these
number directly. In actual fact. Galileo rolled a ball up a gentle slope
to slow the whole process down.

Newton invented calculus to help work out solutions to moving bodies. Its two basic operations –
integration and differentiation – mean that, given one element – force, mass or acceleration – you can work
out the other two. Differentiation is the technique for finding rates of change; integration is the technique for
‘undoing’ the effect of differentiation in order to isolate out the initial variables. Calculating rates of change is
a crucial aspect of math, engineering, cosmology and many other areas of science.