The Big Book of Pi: The Famous Number You Can Never Know

A mathe-magician explores what makes Pi so intriguing, so unknowable and so very important to our lives.



For millennia, humans have been obsessed with the number Pi. We needed it for architecture, geometry and astronomy, and so it was sought by the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans and the ancient Chinese. But no one has ever found it—and no one ever will because Pi is infinite and irrational. Its decimals contain the birthdates of all the children who have ever lived, every piece of music, the complete works of Shakespeare. Pi never ends and can’t be learned, but humans keep on trying. Today, we know trillions of decimals of Pi, even if the first fifteen are more than enough to send a rocket to Mars!



Telling the story of Archimedes the Greek to Srinivasa Ramanujan the Indian (who saw in his dreams a formula for calculating Pi still used by computers today), via Arabs and mathematics enthusiasts from all over the world and all eras, The Big Book of Pi is an extraordinary adventure (almost) to infinity.



Written by a mathe-magician with a Pi-passion, in these pages you’ll meet a man who memorized ten thousand digits—and get a chance to try yourself. You’ll read about a Pi paradox and a Pi magic trick and laugh at more Pi jokes than you ever thought you’d hear. We can’t ever know Pi, but there sure is a lot to learn!