Since this blog takes its name from an artist who wrote about pie and painted π (see last year’s post), I try to offer a little tribute to this beloved irrational number each Pi Day. Today, at 9:26:53 am and pm (twice!), the date will spell out the first ten digits of the number. Well, it will if you write the date in the American style: 3/14/15, 9:26:53.
Last year, I managed to offer nine kinds of π / pie. And this year,… here’s another nine!
1. Andrew Huang’s “Pi Mnemonic Song” (2013)
I’ve featured π music on this blog before (see here and here), but only just discovered this piece, thanks to Paul DeGeorge, who shared it on Facebook. Yes, there’s a minor glitch late in the video. As Huang acknowledges on the song’s YouTube page, “there was an editing error at 1:18 with a couple of the numbers, but the song does all truly line up with Pi.”
2. “Joy of Bubbles,” π art from Cristian Vasile (2014)
Vasile describes the piece as the “First few thousands digits of pi displayed over radial paths. Small size dots.” In an article from last year’s Pi Day, the Guardian shares art from Vasile and others.
3. π in superballs (2015)
Yes, these are my superballs, on my bathroom floor. Why do you ask? Also, technically, they’re not superballs (a brand name) – they’re just bouncy rubber balls. But they do spell π out to the 11th digit.
4. Sandra Boynton’s Pig & Pi (2015)
Every day, Boynton posts something funny via Facebook and Twitter – here’s what she has for today. (I hope the pig finds some pie soon….)
5. Stephen Doyle’s global Pi (2015)
Doyle’s photographic portrait cleverly places the number within a circle, half of a globe – presumably to signal global Pi Day. This piece of art accompanied Manil Suri’s “Don’t Expect Math to Make Sense” in the New York Times, 14 Mar. 2015.
6. Technische Universität Berlin’s Pi mosaic
Located outside the Maths Department at the Technical University of Berlin.
7. Tim Habersack’s π in color (click for larger image)
Click on the above to see the larger image (it takes Pi out to 786,432 digits). As Habersack explains, he “Wrote a php script which reads in the characters of pi one at a time. I assigned a single color to each character, 0 = white, 1 = teal, 2 = blue, etc. I create an image, and starting at position 0,0, I draw in my pi calculation one pixel at a time.”
8. Michael Albert’s Pi collage
From PBS’s “6 Ways to Celebrate Pi Day.”
9. The Barbury Castle Crop Circle (allegedly)
Located in Wiltshire, England, this crop circle is alleged to be a graphic representation of the first ten digits of Pi. Full explanation here, though I’m a bit skeptical of it, myself. Whether or not it spells out Pi, it is an impressive crop circle.