Not much to you, perhaps, but those equations govern the induction motor, which is now the most common form of electric motor: put three coils around an outside former, and put a rotating element inside. If you run a current through the outside coils, and get the timing just right, then you create a current (and hence magnetic force) in the coils in the inside. So the inside rotor turns, but it doesn't have to touch the outer part: less friction means less energy used. (Compare that method to the carbon brushes needed in standard DC motors, which wear away where they touch the inner rotor.)
But it's in the development of mains electricity - the underpinning of our modern age - that Tesla really rules. When Americans tell the story of Thomas Edison, the famous inventor of the gramophone, and whose name is usually attached to the invention of the light bulb, Tesla's name is frequently left out.
However Tesla, who became an American citizen in 1891, worked with Edison for years, improving many of the early inventions and turning them into something workable. (The two were introduced in 1884, when Tesla came to the US, by a letter from a mutual friend to Edison which read "I know of two great men. One is you and the other is this young man.")
Yet it's thanks to Tesla, not Edison, that we have electricity coming out of plugs(插头,插座), and that we even have power stations able to generate serious amounts of energy. He won "the war of the currents" with Edison, who was convinced that direct current (DC) - the sort that comes out of an ordinary battery - was the way forward for power generation and distribution. Tesla was able to show that alternating current (AC) - which swaps its polarity at a regular rate, 50 times a second in UK mains electricity - was far more efficient (you don't lose anything like as much energy in transmitting it over long distances).
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