B.P. Lathi was born in India in a small village with one school which had one room, two teachers and only taught to the fourth grade.
The qualification required of a teacher was to have passed the seventh grade. Lathi was considered a good student in his school until he had to go to a bigger town for studies beyond the fourth grade. There he did fairy well in the English language, which required mostly memory work. But he was scoring 0/100 in mathematics.
This was surely a disaster in the making as at that time, if a student failed any one subject, he had to repeat the entire grade level.
Lathi’s father therefore thought it best to remove him from the school and hire a retired teacher to tutor him in math. Unfortunately, none of the retired teachers in his village succeeded in enlightening him. But then luck smiled upon him. One of the teachers retired, and a new teacher was assigned to that one-room school. This new teacher was no ordinary teacher. He was ‘matric-fail’ (the equivalent of a high-school drop out). Yet, given that all the other teachers in that village had only made it through seventh grade, this new teacher was considered like a Nobel-laureate in the village! He became the talk of the village and Lathi’s father promptly hired him as a tutor.
Although this new tutor failed the 11th grade in his school, he was good at clarifying fifth-grade math and explaining how to logically approach any other math problems. Lathi benefited immensely from this tutoring which helped him greatly in the future. He rejoined the school and started scoring 100/100 in his mathematics class. From there on, Lathi was able to read books on his academic subjects and did not have to depend on class instruction by a teacher. In fact, his habit became to read the book at home and know the subject before it was even discussed in class. This habit proved very useful in the future, especially in his Engineering undergraduate work, where most of the instructors were ill-prepared in the subjects and were of little help in instruction.
But then he encountered a new challenge. Students were assigned British textbooks which generally were very poorly written. The authors appeared to simply cram the book with poorly organized information and which made little sense if one did not know the subject already. Lathi was in a quandary. The instructors were ill-prepared. The textbooks were poorly written. So his habit of reading on his own did not help as much. He would often spend countess hours at night trying to decipher the cryptic books. While American textbooks were somewhat better, they cost twice as much as the British ones. It was at this time he decided that when he finished his education, he would dedicate himself to writing textbooks which the average student would be able to understand without anyone’s help.
Later, Lathi was accepted into the graduate Engineering program at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. After successfully finishing his M.S. in Electrical Engineering, he was offered a research assistant position at Stanford University where he completed his Ph.D.; then, on his advisor’s suggestion, he joined General Electric at Syracuse N.Y.
His mind, however, was constantly focused on the academic field.
He therefore left G.E. to join Bradley University where he wrote his first three textbooks which were all very successful. The first two were best selling pioneers in pedagogy, and served as models for countless other authors. Thereafter, he taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, then served as a visiting professor at a Brazilian University and at the University of Iowa. Finally, he joined the California State University at Sacramento where he wrote his last five textbooks. After the fifth book, when he had become well established as reputable author in the field, he decided to publish his books himself. He founded Berkeley-Cambridge Press, which published his next three books, including two more best sellers. At that point, he accepted a lucrative offer from Oxford University Press to acquire his company Berkeley-Cambridge Press.
After his retirement he was puzzled by violence and bloodshed in the name of religion and God and wanted to understand why a religion which should be fostering human brotherhood was historically the cause of such heavy bloodshed. He spent the next 20 years trying to understand this phenomenon. This book is the outcome of this study and chronicles a part of his findings.