Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number

Rating:
Summary: Revealing the Mystery Behind a Mysterious Number
Review: +++++

This book, by Professors Alfred Posamentier and Igmar Lehmann, reveals the mystery behind the constant number Pi. It is designated by the symbol of the sixteenth lower-case letter of the Greek alphabet and is formally calculated by dividing the circumference of any circle by its diameter. Its value is (3.14...) or approximately (22/7).

This book convinced me that Pi is special and comes up in the most unexpected places. The mathematics needed to fully understand this easy-to-read, informative, engaging, and fun book is "no more...than that of high school mathematics." Large, helpful diagrams accompany all mathematical explanations.

This book consists of nine chapters:

(1) Tells the reader what Pi is and how it achieved its current prominence.
(2) Takes the reader through a brief history of the evolution of Pi. This history goes back four thousand years.
(3) Provides various methods for arriving at Pi's value. A wide variety of methods have been chosen, "some precise, some experimental, and some just good
guessing."
(4) Centers on activities and findings by mathematicians and math hobbyists who have explored the value of Pi and related fields in ways that the ancient mathematicians would never have dreamed of.
(5) Explores some of the curious phenomena that focus on the value and concept of Pi. Primarily here is how Pi relates to other famous numbers and to seemingly unrelated concepts.
(6) Is dedicated to some applications of Pi. The lesson from this chapter is that Pi is ubiquitous -- it always comes up!
(7) Presents some fascinating relationships involving Pi and circles.
(8) This is the book's epilogue. Here, we are presented with Pi to 100,000 decimal places (which uses up almost thirty pages).
(9) This is an afterword by Dr. Herbert Hauptman who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985. He is known "as the first mathematician to win a Nobel Prize."

This book also presents little unknown things about Pi. For example, did you know that there is a Pi song? How many decimal places has Pi been calculated (as of 2002)? There is even a Pi day, a specific month and day in which this number is celebrated! (From the information presented above, a reader of this review should be able to figure out the exact month and day.)

After reading this book, the reader should definitely and confidently be able to say what Pi is.

Finally, this book does tell you everything (and I mean everything) about Pi but I was surprised (especially since the afterword is by a Nobel Laureate in chemistry) that there is no mention of the chemical bond called the "pi bond." It is called this because of its shape. In physics, there are elementary particles called "pi-mesons" or "pions."

In conclusion, this book takes the mystery out of the mysterious number Pi. If you're like me and like exploring mysteries, then this is the book for you!!

(first published 2004; acknowledgments; preface; 7 chapters; epilogue; main narrative 245 pages; afterword; four appendices; references; index)

+++++