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Title: A journey through history, science and personalities
Review: 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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