Interesting. But why on earth is Black-Scholes equation on that list? It's not like Long-Term Capital Management took over the world with it. It's a fragile model and does not deserve to be on the same list as these beautiful and useful ideas.
I have a copy of the book at home, Ian Stewart is a very good populariser of maths.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seventeen-Equations-that-Changed-Wor...
You should take the title of the book literally, equations that changed the world (but not necessarily for the better).
You used Leibnitz notation, Leibnitz kicked Newton's arse, and Newton was a complete arsehole.
The financial meltdowns of the mid 1990s and 2000s certainly had significant global impact, to the point of getting a lot of people to question what they thought they knew of economics. Fairly famously Alan Greenspan, who admitted that he was waylaid by the whole thing. I just happened across his recent book whose title is intruiging, though by reviews and what little of it I skimmed, the content is less than overwhelming: The Map and the Territory.
I'd need to find the backstory on the title, but it is strongly reminiscent of Robert Pirsig's Lila, the opening chapter of which starts with the author navigating a river by what turns out to be the wrong chart. Confusion over our mental models and reality being a major risk factor to current affairs.
This might be of interest:
Black-Scholes opened up a whole world of asset pricing that much of the financial system today is based on. It can be argued that it did indeed have a deep effect on the state of the world through developments in modern finance.
Saying Black-Scholes is imperfect is like saying Newtonian mechanics doesn't account for Relativity. Black-Scholes was the formal starting point for pricing derivatives, or the offloading of risk. Everyone has advanced well beyond it. Blowups not withstanding, without Black-Scholes our lives would be very different.
Comparing it to Newtonian mechanics is unfair. Newtonian mechanics actually work, just not for everything. To have a risk model that doesn't work for risk is something completely different.