Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A History of Pi
    A History of Pi
    A History of Pi
    Audiobook6 hours

    A History of Pi

    Written by Petr Beckmann

    Narrated by Stephen R. Thorne

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    The history of pi, says the author, though a small part of the history of mathematics, is nevertheless a mirror of the history of man. Petr Beckmann holds up this mirror, giving the background of the times when pi made progress-and also when it did not, because science was being stifled by militarism or religious fanaticism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 18, 2019
    ISBN9781630150044
    Author

    Petr Beckmann

    Petr Beckmann was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1924. Until 1963, he worked as a research scientist for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, when he was invited as a Visiting Professor to the University of Colorado, where he decided to stay permanently as professor of electrical engineering. He has authored books including The History of Pi and more than fifty scientific papers, mostly on probability theory and electromagnetic wave propagation.

    Related to A History of Pi

    Related audiobooks

    Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Geology Can Ease Your Mind

      Feb 13, 2020

      As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet—in a 10-week trimester. But as a hum

      11 min read

    • Article

      Geology Makes You Time-Literate

      Sep 13, 2018

      As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet—in a 10-week trimester. But as a hum

      11 min read

    • Article

      Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History

      Feb 13, 2020

      Claudius Ptolemy’s monumental astronomy book, the Almagest, established a unified mathematical framework for computing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets at any time in the past, present, or future. So comprehensive and so compelling

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Transcendent Brain

      Dec 5, 2022

      The Transcendent Brain
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Modern Mind May Be 100,000 Years Old: New fossil evidence shows sophisticated thought began earlier than we thought.

      Sep 29, 2016

      When I started learning about the Ice Age, the oldest known cave art dated to about 35,000 years ago—now it’s closer to 41,000 years. And while they seemed like a fairly intelligent species, Neanderthals weren’t thought to have been capable of creati

      18 min read

    • Article

      “Graves Are Like Time Capsules – Little Microcosms Of Prehistoric Culture”

      Jun 10, 2021

      Ellie Cawthorne: what kind of things might you find in a prehistoric grave, and what could they reveal about the past? Alice Roberts: Prehistory is intensely interesting to me because the only way that we can approach it is through archaeology. You a

      10 min read

    • Article

      A Compendium Of Cryptids

      Mar 21, 2024

      A Compendium Of Cryptids
      11 min read

    • Article

      Our Library

      Jun 6, 2022

      The concept of superstition has been with us for millennia, and yet today it has no agreed-upon meaning. We tend to know it when we see it – as in the examples above. If it carries a single enduring connotation, it is one of disapproval. From almost

      2 min read

    • Article

      When Research Is A Monster

      Feb 3, 2020

      When Research Is A Monster
      4 min read

    • Article

      What a 9,000-Year-Old Spruce Tree Taught Me: How photographing the world’s oldest living things pushed me outside the boundaries of science.

      Mar 19, 2015

      I had little idea of what I would discover when I set out to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. I expected that researching, traveling, and photographing would stretch my perspective, and force me to learn a lot of science: bi

      8 min read

    • Article

      Monsters, Marvels, and the Birth of Science: How the Unlikely and Unexplainable, Strange and Terrifying, Spawned the Age of Science.: How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

      Aug 1, 2013

      Finding regularity in nature is the bread and butter of science. We know that reptiles lay eggs, while mammals bear live young; the Earth revolves around the sun every 365.25 days; electrons glom onto protons like bears onto honey. But what if some o

      11 min read

    • Article

      Why You Didn’t See It Coming

      Feb 2, 2017

      You don’t see it coming. You probably couldn’t if you tried. The effects of large changes in scale are frequently beyond our powers of perception, even our imagination. They seem to emerge out of nowhere: the cumulative effects of climate change, the

      7 min read

    • Article

      Q&A

      Oct 6, 2021

      Q&A
      6 min read

    • Article

      Why We Love Dinosaurs

      Dec 20, 2018

      People have always known of dinosaurs, though they have called them by many names. Old legends that place Western dragons in caves or beneath the earth may have originated with fossils. The plumed serpent, prominent in mythologies of Mexico and Latin

      8 min read

    • Article

      The New science Of History

      Mar 1, 2024

      The New science Of History
      16 min read

    • Article

      Talk About the Passion

      Aug 9, 2023

      Talk About the Passion
      19 min read

    • Article

      Wisdom Of The Ancients

      Oct 15, 2020

      Wisdom Of The Ancients
      5 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Oct 19, 2021

      By Amber Gartrell ISBN: 978-1108477550 Cambridge University Press (2021) – $99.99 www.cambridge.org Once upon a time there were two brothers. The Greeks knew them as the Dioskouroi, the Romans as the Dioscuri. Sons of Leda, queen of Sparta, they had

      5 min read

    • Article

      “Magic Is A Really Important Strand Of What It Means To Be Human”

      Jul 9, 2020

      Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book surveys a vast array of magical beliefs throughout human history. How do you define magic? Chris Gosden: My definition of magic is a human openness to the universe. And a universe’s openness to people. Let me give you

      9 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 26, 2020

      Columbia University Press £22 ● HB Astronomy is often said to be the oldest science and yet, for all our space exploration, we still have more questions than answers. Was there ever life on Mars? Is there a ninth planet hiding on the outskirts of o

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A History of Pi

    3.5/5

    144 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This a well written book that sits at the edge of math and history. Its genius is in the tone. Mr Beckmann is an opinionated fellow (don't ask him for his thoughts on the United Nations), but his arguments are intelligent, well put together, and easy to understand. As for the math, I understood the first half. The second half I usually got the concepts, but the actual math was beyond me. The illustrations of the principals were actually useful and placed in a spot that fit the narrative. I also was very impressed that he he didn't neglect what was happening in Asia- for the time it was written (1970's), it would have taken a lot of research to get this information. One last thing, the time the book was written, computers were nowhere near what they are in today. It took about 28 hours to calculate pi to 250,000 places. I suspect the laptop I'm typing this on can do it in a few minutes. This doesn't detract from the book, but adds to the charm. It's amazing how far we've come, technology wise, in the last 50 years.
    • 4/5
      Dr. Beckmann wasn’t known for being afraid of saying what he felt, dissing Aristotle, Julius Caesar, the medieval Catholic Church, and Stalin (who he never dignifies with a mention by name, but simply calls “the Soviet Jenghiz Khan”; I personally think this is something of an insult to Genghis Khan).
      Although Beckmann claims the book is nonmathematical, it’s chock full of geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus; I really need to read it again while equipped with AutoSketch and MathCAD, to follow some of the derivations. There are a few claims – for example, that late medieval Florentine bankers were forbidden to use infidel Arabic numerals and that a Spaniard was burned at the stake for claiming to have solved a quartic equation – where I would like to check the footnotes. However, there is one well-documented debunking of an urban legend – that the Indiana legislature once nearly voted to make π equal to 3 based on the Biblical reference in II Kings 7. What Beckmann uncovered is nearly as interesting; Edwin J. Goodwin of Solitude, Indiana, had succeeded in squaring the circle and many other interesting geometrical problems, and offered his new mathematics textbook to the State of Indiana royalty-free if they adopted his value for π. The bill made it to a second reading before it was intercepted by a visiting mathematics professor and tabled. The irony here is that the language of the bill is so complicated that it isn’t clear exactly what value Goodwin was proposing; as near as Beckmann can make it out it’s 16√3, which would have made pi about 9.2376 – as Beckmann notes, the most serious overestimate in the history of mathematics.
      A lot of useful capsule biographies of eminent historic mathematicians, so it’s a valuable little book even if you don’t follow – or don’t want to follow – the math. In case you want to calculate the diameter of the universe to the nearest nanometer, the first 10000 digits of pi are included in the endpapers. Recommended.
    • 1/5
      This is one of the weirdest books I've ever read, certainly the weirdest math book. Sure, it covers the history of calculating approximations of pi from Antiquity to the mid 20th century, but it also has an entire chapter devoted to the thuggery of the Roman empire; asides on the sex life of Catherine the Great; an apparently made up Latin quote from Empress Maria Therese's doctor on manually stimulating the clitorem ante coitum; condemnations of the Asiatic Soviets; another section on how much of an idiot Aristotle was... almost every page had something that made me stop and go "wait, what the hell was that?"
    • 2/5
      I like books about the history of math and numbers, but this one was a bit of a slog at times. Lots of equations. It also was strangely dated, what with the author's frequent scathing commentary on the USSR. He also feels a strong hatred for the Romans. Putting all that aside, there are some really interesting nuggets here and there, but in general I imagine this book would only appeal to the truly diehard number nerds.
    • 3/5
      A very strange book. Enjoyable overall, but filled with non sequiturs and rants against people (Aristotle, Romans) and ideas (socialism) that that author, who must have been a real character, doesn't like.
    • 5/5
      This book is exactly what it says: a history of pi from ropes in wet sand to computers. It is a little dated at almost fourty years old, but considering the thousands of years of mathematical history, it covers the developments of the calculation of pi very well. The author is opinionated, but that does not affect his thoroughness. There are numerous geometric proofs and formulous throughout, but they support the text without being the focus. The writing is straight forward and factual. I thought this was an excellent presentation of the subject.
    • 3/5
      a bit of a rant, with (to my mind) needless disparagement of aristotle (among others). a somewhat irritating and inconsistent bias toward the practical ("There is no practical or scientific value in knowing more than the 17 decimal places...", p.101). digs up many interesting facts (i hope they are facts) about the discovery and calculation of π. some sections (eg computer capabilities, c.1970) dated by now(2008).
    • 3/5
      Beckmann’s approach to this much-written history is novel at best. He starts from a social and historical vantage point and recreates the math from scratch. Although at times, highly mathematical (as any history of pi must be), it entertains nonetheless. He ends with a tangent on the computer age (note: this book was originally written in 1971) and its potential pitfalls. A good quick read.
    • 1/5
      Too much politics, not enough math history.
    • 5/5
      Beckmann makes math history entertaining by setting it in a larger historical context, and liberally lacing the story with his own political opinions. As one of the most important numbers in mathematics, π really does need its own history, and Beckmann gives a good overview of mathematicians' attempts to approximate or calculate π throughout history. His story is not just one of abstract mathematical endeavor, however; he sets those mathematical advances in their social and political context. His history is geographically complete, at least as complete as the records are available; aside from the Near Eastern and Greek attempts at calculating π, he discusses Chinese, Japanese, and Mayan knowledge of π, to the extent that there are surviving records.Beckmann's writing style is clear, and while he does include a good deal of math, the story still flows if the reader skips over the harder parts.