Wellness

WRAP YOUR MIND AROUND PI TODAY 3.14.15.92653...

Progression and transition for the first 10,000 digits of π by Martin Krzywinski.

by Martin Krzywinski. Progression and transition for the first 10,000 digits of π..

Today we are all about celebrating the irrational. Because today is a very special Pi Day. It holds the most accurate temporal representation of Pi in the 21st century:

3.141592653 = March 14, 2015. 9:26:53 AM

So we are sharing some amazing Pi art and ideas with you today. Creative minds and Pi have a lot in common, they are both irrational and they both can go on forever...

MARTIN KRZYWINSKI

Martin Krzywinski loves Pi. He creates visual odes to this endless number, in a seemingly endless variety of ways. Some of his expressions look like intricate embroideries. Others look like candy dots.

Pi graphics make great posters. You can buy beautiful prints of Krzywinski’s Pi art here.

Krzywinski works in bioinformatics and data visualization. He became fascinated with the patterns that Pi’s digits create. And the further he takes them the cooler the images become. Check out his color-coded dots spiraling out to 13,688 decimal places.

For his Protein Fix piece, Martin Krzywinski created a string of dots, representing the first 768 digits of Pi and color-coded them, making all prime digits black. His computer algorithm ‘folded’ the string to maximize the number of adjacent black dots.

Check out his full explanation on his website.

FRANCISCO JAVIER ARAGÓN ARTACHO

Francisco Javier Aragón Artacho messed with Pi even more. He and his team converted Pi into base 4, meaning that it is written using only the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3. He then designated these four digits to represent north, south, east and west, and tracked a random walk of pi for 100 billion digits.

Close-up views of Aragón’s 100 billion random walk are also quite intriguing.

The Pi-obsessed team also graphed a random walk that uses only the first 10 billion base 4 digits of pi that looks much more delicate.

Artacho got his undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the University of Alicante and his Ph.D. in optimization at the University of Murcia, both in Spain.

TAU TRUMPS PI???

A growing number of mathematicians are radically proposing that pi is wrong. In the Tau Manifesto, by physicist Michael Hartl, it contends that "pi is a confusing and unnatural choice for the circle constant." Instead, it is postulated that 2π, aka tau is the more rational irrational answer.

So how can you celebrate Tau Day (6/28/15)? Eat twice as much pie, of course!

MIT DRONES

Of course MIT takes Pi Day pretty seriously. And this year, because Pi Day is more special than usual, they went a bit over the top.

Every year on March 14, MIT mails its admission decisions to anxiously awaiting students. And each year they do have a bit of fun with it, smashing pies in faces, pie tastings, and other sweet stuff. They create cool videos to memorialize the moments.

But this year, they upped the surprise. Check out their two-minute video and watch a swarm of drones buzzing around to the “Flight of the Valkyries,” delivering their golden acceptance letters to the class of 2019.

Student acceptance notifications will be released today, on Saturday, March 14, at 9:26 a.m. Applicants can learn whether they’ve been accepted on the school’s admissions website.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Circles in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 03.15.15. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!

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Do you have amazing photos of Beautiful Circles? Enter them in this week’s BN Photo Competition. We run new creative competitions every week!

IMAGE CREDITS:

Image: by Martin Krzywinski. Progression and transition for the first 10,000 digits of π.
Image: by Martin Krzywinski. Progression and transition for the first 1,000 digits of π.
Image: by Martin Krzywinski. 2013 Pi Day poster.
Image: by Martin Krzywinski. Distribution of the first 13,689 digits of Pi.
Image: by Martin Krzywinski. Protein Fix.
Image: by Francisco Javier Aragón Artacho. 100 billion step walk on the digits of pi.
Image: by Francisco Javier Aragón Artacho. Close up of the 100 billion random walk.
Image: by Francisco Javier Aragón Artacho. A walk on the first 10 billion base-4 digits of Pi.
Video: by Vi Hart. Pi Is (still) Wrong.
Image: Courtesy of MITBloggers. Keep your eyes to the skies this Pi Day.
Video: by MITbloggers. Keep your eyes to the skies this Pi Day.
Image: by Martin Krzywinsk. Transition paths for the first 10,000 digits of π. Concept by Cristian Ilies Vasile.
Image: by Martin Krzywinsk.Digit transition paths of sixteen 1,000 digit random numbers.
Image: by Martin Krzywinsk.