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. Krzywinski started publishing his pi art in 2013, beginning with this visualization:
Mathematicians have computed pi out to 10 trillion digits and seen no evident pattern. But what really vexes mathematicians is that no one can definitely say that pi is random -- no one has figured out the mathematical proof. And in another sense, pi is anything but random: After all, the number embodies the order of a perfect circle.
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