The Beautiful Flow of Pi (Infographic)

Cristian Ilies Vasile designed the beautiful numbers-based infographic Flow Of Life, Flow Of Pi. He did so using the first one-thousand (1,000) digits of the infinite mathematical constant π (pi). Vasile used the data visualization software tool Circos to plot the sequence of digits in a circular pattern. Using this method, Vasile has also created a few different varieties of the artwork that you can view on his portfolio site.

Starting with the first digit “3”, a connecting arc is drawn to each subsequent digit (3.14159265358979323846…). Since the sequence is theorized to be a random sequence of digits, it creates a beautiful visualization that appears evenly distributed among the ten integers. Check out this analysis and explanation by Martin Krzywinski along with some of his own artwork.

More from Krzywinski:

Each digit is assigned a segment around the circle and a link between segment i and j corresponds to the appearance of ij in π. For example, the “14” in “3.14…” is drawn as a link between segment 1 and segment 4.

The position of the link on a digit’s segment is associated with the position of the digit π. For example, the “14” link associated with the 2nd digit (1) and the 3rd digit (4) is drawn from position 2 on the 1 segment to position 3 on the 4 segment.

As more digits are added to the path, the image becomes a weaving mandala.

He demonstrates the sequence with this visualization of just the first five digits 3.14159…

Martin Krzywinski does a stellar job of explaining in detail the theory behind Cristian Ilies Vasile’s visualization. Furthermore, he took the time to help break Vasile’s project down visually. In doing so, he was able to make Vasile’s effort more understandable for the non-mathematically inclined.

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