Overview

For four thousand years, mathematicians have been chasing a number they can never quite catch. Beyond the Circle: How Pi Shaped Human Civilisation is the first narrative history of pi to tell the full global story - from Babylonian clay tablets and Egyptian papyri to the Kerala mathematicians who discovered calculus two centuries before Newton, from Archimedes trapping pi between polygon bounds to the Chudnovsky brothers building a supercomputer in a Manhattan apartment to compute it to a billion decimal places. Pi is not just the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It is irrational - inexpressible as any fraction. It is transcendental - beyond the reach of algebra. It appears in the formula for the normal distribution of random errors, in the energy levels of the hydrogen atom, in the meandering paths of rivers, and in the most beautiful equation in mathematics. It is simultaneously the most familiar and the most exotic number in existence. Author Shweta Shirsat traces the human pursuit of this infinite, non-repeating decimal across seven parts and twenty-two chapters, weaving together mathematics, history, philosophy, and culture into a single compelling narrative. Readers will meet the ancient scribes who approximated pi for practical necessity, the Greek geometers who demanded proof, the overlooked Indian and Islamic mathematicians whose contributions European history long ignored, and the digital-age obsessives who have pushed the digit count past one hundred trillion. Beyond the Circle is written for anyone who has ever been told that pi is approximately 3.14 and wondered - why approximately? Why not exactly? What is the number, precisely? That question turns out to be one of the most productive questions in human intellectual history. Perfect for readers of Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem, Charles Seife's Zero, and Robert Kanigel's The Man Who Knew Infinity. An essential addition to any bookshelf of popular mathematics and science history.

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