Imagine if the whole of life were reducible to a single formula. The results are not just unexpected but as weird and as wonderful as life itself. Many of the most creative and original minds of our time - more than a hundred from the worlds of art, science, mathematics, architecture, design, performance, literature and sociology - give us their personal and enterprising, or visionary, or inventive or novel, or just deleriously delectable, formulas for contemporary life. Damien Hirst's colour wheel; 'sex x technology = the future' by J. G. Ballard; Gilbert & George's injunctionto ban religion; a distillation of Darwinian theory from Richard Dawkins; Olafur Eliasson's x and y axis; peter Saville's sketched diagrams, Louise Bourgeois's conviction that there is no logic in love................