The book is an in-depth technical treatment of the subject, but it is very readable for the layman. Beckmann deals with the arguments against nuclear power in a clear and decisive fashion. There is an interesting analysis of the reasons for the controversy as well. The only major problem I have with this book is the fact that it is rather outdated at 20+ years old.

A thoughtful examination of the energy issue, as well as environmental safety concerns associated with it. Accurate, reliable well researched, I strongly recommend this book for anyone concerned with the future of society or the environment.

Petr Beckmann stands up and answers the anti-nuclear attacks. He is very scientific in his answers. This book was written in a way that those without nuclear scientific know-how could understand. Most enjoyable was the voice and attitude Petr Beckmann used. He was tired of the stupid reasons used against nuclear power, and he explains why these reason were stupid.

While this "history of Pi" presents a satisfactory accounting of the history of mathematics in a fairly enjoyable way, the author's tangents must relegate it to the b-string of math-oriented popular books. While I didn't find the lack of detailed proofs problematic, the compromise he attempts to find between proof-heavy math book and light popular book results in a rather schizophrenic treatment of some very interesting and relevant topics (such as continued fractions). He fails, too, to pursue the implications those useless digits of Pi have for our understanding of the universe, though perhaps when the book was written these implications weren't quite so obvious.

Many have described the opinion-heavy style of Dr. Beckmann; I only wish to add that his opinions are handed out in the classical Objectivist style. That is, they're in a tone meant to make the reader feel complicit in their sentiment and far above any reproach they might be dealing. For example, his complaints about the fledgling environmental movement neglect any facts and refer to activists as "frustrated housewives on messianic trips." This sort of dismissal out-of-hand is used on Aristotle, on the Romans, on the Soviets -- all based on few factual examples. While I *agree* with him on the great flaws of Aristotle (at least as a scientist and mathematician), on the Romans (though he apparently regards George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" as historically accurate enough from which to quote Julius Caesar), and on the Soviets (though Oppenheimer and Turing didn't get much fair treatment on "our" side of the Iron Curtain), I find this treatment distracting. He has other tricks to make the reader feel "smart" -- the epigraph for chapter 9 is the ever-popular "eppur si muove", but instead of citing it to Galileo, as is commonly done, he gives it to Giordano Bruno as a dying cry. While he acknowledges in the footnotes that there's not a single good reason to attribute it to Bruno, it's still the sort of gambit an author employs to send his reader quoting this new correction of popular fact to everyone he meets, feeling smugly superior.

I recommend the book, especially if you can get it inexpensively (it's terribly short). If ever you find yourself feeling superior when reading it, though, realize that you've fallen prey to Dr. Beckmann's little trap.

I picked this book up as a sophomore in the mathematics department at the local university. I had for the previous two years been living and breathing only mathematics and was ready to scream. I was exhausted, frustrated, and quickly losing the love of mathematics that had fueled my progress thusfar.

Then I found this book at the bookstore. It was obviously nontechnical, but the last thing I wanted at the time was another text where it took days of concentration to finish a single chapter. Adding to this the fact that it was marked down to $, I couldn't pass on it.

The author has trouble distancing this work from his political, social, and intellectual views, and at times his paranoia that the Soviet Union would find a way to rule the world and destroy all works of science ever produced are annoying, and if this were deleted from the text it would probably be twenty pages shorter. But behind his rantings, we find an interesting presentation of the historical development of a number which keeps popping up in the most unlikely of places.

He highlights our progress in understanding the properties of pi and gives a sampling of the areas of mathematics, physics, and engineering where pi is often encountered.

Most importantly to me though, this book did not require the efforts of the college textbooks but gave an enjoyable and mildly addictive tour of classical mathematics. I believe that had I not found this text when I did I would have abandoned math.

One of the reviewers complained about this book's continuous digressions. Well, you must know before reading this book that mathematicians were never great historians. Dr Beckmann is a professor of Electrical Engineering and this is more in the Physics side. This makes him potentially worse of a historian. But then would you please stop for a second and tell me what you want to know in a book about "Pi!"

I know I want to know almost anything there is about it. I want to know its origin, how people dealt with it in ancient days, and how people are dealing with it nowadays or in the past 100 year. Do not be mystified, for this number was known long long ago.

Then what is wrong with digressions? We want to know as much as possible, don't we? I saw that Dr Beckmann insights were all interesting. You would say, "Oh, yeah, another one of those geeky mathematicians." But I would only answer that I hate computers but read the section about applying the computer in computing new digits of this strange number.

This number appears in so many places in mathematics. The most famous is in the formula relating the circumference of the circle to the radius. And it appears in so many other sciences. It was the passion of so many amateur mathematicians to compete in the memorization of as many as a million digits after the decimal point.

Do you see why I decided to read the book? It is worth your time. Read it you too.

Weymouth doesn't sound like he even read the book. If he had, he might wonder why the author theorizes that the local gravitational field acts as a medium for light, since we've known since the last century that light travels in a vacuum. It doesn't need a medium, so Beckmann's self-published argument falls apart.

Even if it did, why should we assume that it doesn't rotate, except of course out of convenience for the sake of this bizarre theory? The earth's magnetic field rotates, so its gravitational field likely does too, and recent findings by astronomers have shown strong preliminary evidence to that effect (the Gravity Proble B experiment is designed to confirm this "frame-dragging effect" predicted by Einstein).

The guy up the top there is a big snob.Drinking beer has no direct relation to your I.Q. So up yours buddy. I drink and have understood the book probably better than he would ever dream. So if you are smart you will get a lot more out of the book.

In East-Indian cosmology, there are 4 basic building blocks of the universe: 1) sound (OM) or "The Word" as in St. John, 2) Time, 3) Space, and 4) The Atom. I side with Beckmann, Ives, Michelson and Lorentz.

There is so much to enjoy in this book. If you get your hands on this book, even for a moment, at least read the preface and the introduction. They are brilliant and short. His "Grandiose Theory of the Railroad Track" shows Beckmann's humor and his insight. I also love Mr. Beckmann's simple statement that "a theory that does not recognize the equality of action and reaction cannot, without apology, invoke the conservation of momentum." [p.77]

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An introduction to electromagnetic rough surface scattering in the high frequency domain. Its an old text and there are numerous errors in printing as I found out when using it for research work, but nonetheless a good introduction, its clear and not too advanced in contrast to other texts which seem to thrive on jumping into difficult analysis without preparation. It covers many areas in rough surface scattering and uses both analytic functions for the surface and later a random function approach. The random function approach has now become standard and misses some of the interesting aspects and details in the earlier one eg fractal surfaces etc.

The book after introducing the characteristic aspects of EM scattering then proceeds onto practical engineering aspects such as remote sensing and the like. This was of course brand new at the time, 1963. For a modern review see the book by J.A. Ogilvy "Theory of Wave Scattering from Random Rough Surfaces" which covers the new approaches to the subject since the 60's.

Still an excellent book for the basics of EM scattering although one has to work through some of the results to be certain they are correct.