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Title: A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann ISBN: 0-312-38185-9 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 July, 1976 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.72 (39 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting math, period-piece politics, a hardcover flame
Comment: The cold-war era spawned a group of people who believed that the greatest threat to humanity was Soviet Communism. Beckmann was a mordant, informed example of kind. In reading this book, I got the feeling that he couldn't write a grocery list without taking a few good swipes at the Russians. He had a few other targets on his list: anti-nuclear activists, new-age mystification pedlars, and organized religion, at least in the forms that have achieved totalitarian power in society.
Like the Irish of James Joyce's Ulysses, he finds the Roman Empire to be an overblown, violent, anti-intellectual tyranny. Unlike the Irish, he thinks that the Brits are wonderful. After all, they took good care of Isaac Newton.
Scattered around this leavening of political rhetoric is a mathematical history of pi. Here, too, there's a polemic. Beckman dosen't like modern math teaching methods. Nonetheless, the material is interesting. You can imagine the sarcastic field-day that he gets out of the Indiana State Legislature's near-miss at legislating pi to be equal to 3.
The book ends with a badly dated and rather uninformed exploration of computerized calculations of pi.
All in all, I found the book to be a window into a rather obsessive personality. I'm not sure I care enough about the various calculations of pi to justify the toasty feeling of reading a 100 page flame.
Rating: 4
Summary: A leisure read
Comment: Buy this book if you are a math lover and are also interested in its history. Although It's not an serious math book than you can learn whole lot of math from, it does contain some mathematical derivations, formulas, proofs which can be skipped without destroying the coherency of the author's presentation.
Rating: 4
Summary: A journey through history, science and personalities
Comment: This is more than a "book on mathematics". It is an engaging work, chock full of diagrams, charts and illustration, that serve to highlight the witty, erudite text. ALong the way we touch a variety of subjects, numerology, ancient Greece and Rome, professional jealousy, explorers, the Middle Ages and last, but not least, the seeimingly infinite ways in which people have tried to calculate the value of pi.
We start in neolithic times and advance to the Egyptians and Babylonians where he surmises on their attemtps to derive this important number. The book is arranged chronolgically and Beckmann attempts to portray the social and scientific conditions under which a particular theory was conceived. It is also the story of the greats of science, the giants of the mind - Archimedes, Euclid, Newton, Pascal and Euler (and thers).
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Title: e: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor ISBN: 0691058547 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 04 May, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife, Matt Zimet ISBN: 0140296476 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 05 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Joy of Pi by David Blatner ISBN: 0802775624 Publisher: Walker & Co Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: An Imaginary Tale by Paul J. Nahin ISBN: 0691027951 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 24 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: To Infinity and Beyond by Eli Maor ISBN: 0691025118 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 09 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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