The Art of Pi [3.14159… up to 10,000]

While browsing online, I came across several examples of Pi artworks especially published by Gardian on Pi-day and Visual Cinnamon. The idea was to create something which was not very informative but was more of an art. And this one is especially inspired by the one created for Visual Cinnamon.

The Start

I started off with working on illustrator assigning every number a color, plotting the digit and its immediate successor. Also a small circle in the bottom to show if the digit under review and its immediate next digit is the same.

The Change

It was almost impossible to plot all its digits on illustrator and so I started learning R. Since I had to spend no time cleaning the data, as it already was, I established a basic algorithm to create steps in a 2D field where the directions and color became defined by the digit itself. Starting from 3 at point (0,0) on the graph, every digit was at 36 degree angle from its previous digit. Refer to the image of the first 10 digits below for a visual explanation.

For the orders above 1000 digits and more, the above approach had become a colorful explosion. As I increased the digits gradually, I became more interested in seeing the walk they took. And this explosion was not helping me realize the path traveled. Therefore I used a color scale from the image above but let it spread out all over the digits used.

This is how pi takes a walk around the World.
And since there is a colour explosion and the actual path determined by this walk is hard to identify, I had to make a little change in the colour scheme, the colours now change for every 1000 digits, as below:

With this I explored the world of Data Art, something that would not look bad hanging on a wall. Or something that can be sued as branding or marketing material.