10 stunning images show the beauty hidden in pi
By Ana Swanson
Saturday — March 14, 2015, or 3/14/15 — marks an extremely nerdy holiday. It is the official celebration of π, the magical, mathematical and infinite constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
For any circle you can imagine, if you divide the distance around the circle by the distance across it, you will get pi, or 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749
445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066
470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385…
We could keep going, but you get the picture.
Some people will celebrate the holiday by making and eating pies (Washington restaurants are offering specials on everything from pizza to banana cream). Others will run a Pi-K race of 3.14 kilometers. And some data tinkerers are making art that visualize pi’s infinite and random digits.
One of the best known of these data tinkerers is Martin Krzywinski, a scientist who specializes in bioinformatics, or using computer science and statistics to understand biological data.