I just received this book yesterday for winning a mathematics award at my high school. It's an interesting little book about this number that has captivated people for centuries. There's nothing new here - it's essentially a compilation of all the pi anecdotes and proof sketches that the author could find.
But it's a fun little book. Scattered throughout the book in really small print are the first million digits of Pi. The text is broken by many little sidebars and quotes, and there are formulas to calculate Pi throughout. If you have computer software that will allow you to calculate these series to at least 100 decimal places or so, see how fast the series converge.
One of the great themes in Pi calculation is finding series that converge faster and faster. Some series for Pi are, of course, quite elementary: 4(1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - ...) comes to mind, but this takes forever to converge. Then there are the "mystical" formulas - the ones where I have no idea how they equal Pi, but they do. For example, this formula, from the Chudnovsky brothers on p. 71: 1/Pi = 12 * (the sum on n = 0 to infinity) (-1)^n * (6n)!/((n!)^3*(3n!)) * (13591409+545140134n)/(640320^(3n+3/2)) which looks much more formidable, but gives 14 decimal places per term. This mystical aspect of Pi has attracted many geniuses over the centuries (including Ramanujan - there's a sidebar about him), and it isn't lost on Blatner.
Buy this book. You don't have to read it cover to cover - in fact, it's probably better to just dip in at random points here and there and see what you find.
