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

It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, a transcendental number, and to some people, an obsession. Posamentier (mathematics education, City College, CUNY) and Lehmann (mathematics, Humboldt U., Berlin) examine how pi has been an object of fascination from the Old Testament, through an act proposed in Indiana in 1897 setting its value, to a recent experiment with a supercomputer that netted a total of 1.24 trillion numbers to the right of the decimal point. Along the way they show how pi actually works according to Cusanus, Rumanujan, and even Wankel. The epilog contains pi expressed in 100,000 decimal places for the reader's enjoyment. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Alfred S. Posamentier (River Vale, NJ) is the dean of the School of Education and professor of mathematics education at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. He has published over fifty books in the area of mathematics and mathematics education, including The Pythagorean Theorem; Math Charmers; and (with Ingmar Lehmann) The Glorious Golden Ratio; Mathematical Amazements and Surprises; The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers; and Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number.

Ingmar Lehmann (Berlin, Germany) is on the mathematics faculty at Humboldt University in Berlin. He also heads the Berlin Mathematics Student Society for gifted secondary school students. A prolific author of books on mathematics and mathematics education, he is the coauthor with Alfred S. Posamentier of The Glorious Golden Ratio; Mathematical Amazements and Surprises; The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers; and Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number.