Visualizing Digits

A tribute to the work of Martin Krzywinski



Among many others amazing visualizations, Martin Krzywinski is the author of these beautiful posters for the 2014 Pi Day. In these posters, each digit of pi (up to the Feynman point) is represented by a circle of a given colour, according to the legend showed above.

My D3 recreation of Krzywinski’s poster goes up to 10,000 digits of pi and three other irrational numbers: e (the base of natural logarithms) , φ (the greek letter “phi”, representing the golden ratio) and the square root of 2. Just as in his poster, I’m using three concentrical circles with different radiuses to represent a group of three digits. Also, I’m using the same colour scale.

A new digit is drawn every 10 milliseconds. The counters at the left and right of the chart show the current decimal place.