Happy Pi Day!

Mar 14, 2019 | Blog

Happy Pi Day everyone!

While many people are celebrating by baking and eating pies, I decided to go to the data. Pi is an interesting number, it’s irrational, so it has an endless number of digits that it can be calculated out to. Using that endless supply of information, I came up with some graphics using Python, Tableau, and Illustrator. While this is original content, it’s not an original idea. I’ve seen many versions of this done, but in particular I want to give credit to the Nadieh Bremerat Visual Cinnamon for heavily inspiring this, her work is better than mine and I recommend checking it out.

These paths are created where each segment of the line represents a digit, and the angle of the line depends on what digit it is. Below is the key along with an example.

Now that we have the basics down, we can extend this out to however many digits we want. Let’s start with just a 1,000.

Let’s increase that by 100 x to 100,000 digits of pi.

Finally, here’s one million digits of pi.

And all together in a single image.

Happy Pi Day!