A History of Pi

Template:Short description Template:Template otherTemplate:Wikidata image Template:Pi box A History of Pi (also titled A History of Template:Pi) is a 1970 non-fiction book by Petr Beckmann that presents a layman's introduction to the concept of the mathematical constant pi (Template:Pi).

Author

Beckmann was a Czechoslovakian who fled the Communist regime to go to the United States. His dislike of authority gives A History of Pi a style that belies its dry title. For example, his chapter on the era following the classical age of ancient Greece is titled "The Roman Pest"; he calls the Catholic Inquisition the act of "insane religious fanatic"; and he says that people who question public spending on scientific research are "intellectual cripples who drivel about 'too much technology' because technology has wounded them with the ultimate insult: 'They can't understand it any more.'"

Beckmann was a prolific scientific author who wrote several electrical engineering textbooks and non-technical works, founded Golem Press, which published most of his books, and published his own monthly newsletter, Access to Energy. In his self-published book Einstein Plus Two and in Internet flame wars, he claimed that the theory of relativity is incorrect.

Bibliography

A History of Pi was originally published as A History of Template:Pi in 1970 by Golem Press. This edition did not cover any approximations of Template:Pi calculated after 1946. A second edition, printed in 1971, added material on the calculation of Template:Pi by electronic computers, but still contained historical and mathematical errors, such as an incorrect proof that there exist infinitely many prime numbers. A third edition was published as A History of Pi in 1976 by St. Martin's Press. It was published as A History of Pi by Hippocrene Books in 1990. The title is given as A History of Pi by both Amazon and by WorldCat.

See also

• History of Pi