In 1939, when Beckmann was 14, his family fled their home in Prague, Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. From 1942 to 1945, he served in a Czech squadron of the Royal Air Force. He received a B.Sc. in 1949, a Ph.D. in 1955, and a D.Sc. in 1962, all from Prague's Czech Academy of Sciences in electrical engineering. He defected to the United States in 1963 and became a Professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. In the United States, he became acquainted with novelist Ayn Rand, a contributing editor to a publication devoted to her ideas, The Intellectual Activist, and a speaker at The Thomas Jefferson School, an intellectual conference of similar purpose. Beckmann was a prolific author; he wrote several electrical engineering textbooks and non-technical works. By 1968 he had founded Golem Press, which published most of his books, including The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, which argued in favor of nuclear power during the height of the anti-nuclear movement by contrasting the cost, in human terms, with the equivalent costs of the alternatives available. Beckmann also wrote A History of , documenting the history of the calculation of pi|. He published his own monthly newsletter, Access to Energy, which since September 1993 has been written by biochemist Arthur B. Robinson. In 1981, he took early retirement with Emeritus status, in order to devote himself fully to what he saw as the defense of science, technology and free enterprise, through his newsletter, Access to Energy. He founded the Golem Press in 1967, publishing more than nine books. These included The History of , Einstein Plus Two, and The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear. He wrote some 60 scientific papers and eight technical books. Dr. Beckmann spoke at the 1990 San Francisco Conference of International Society for Individual Liberty, where he received a standing ovation for his speech in which he attacked "sham environmentalists". Beckmann was also a frequent and colorful participant in Usenet debates. In them, he claimed to have debunked Albert Einstein'stheory of special relativity in his book Einstein Plus Two, as well as in a disputatious journal, Galilean Electrodynamics, which he also founded. The History of π also expresses his intense and colorful opposition to Catholicism, Nazism, and Communism.
