![expose-the-light:
The first 4,000,000 digits of Pi, visualized in a single image
Pi is what’s known as an irrational number, which means that its decimal representation is both infinite and non-repeating.
We’ve been using computers to calculate the digits of Pi for decades. In 1949, John von Neumann and his colleagues used ENIAC — the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer — to calculate Pi to the 2,037th digit. We surpassed the million-digit milestone in 1973. And on October 17, 2011, after 371 days of computing, Shigeru Kondo finished calculating Pi to 10 trillion decimal places.
The picture up top is adapted from a rather simple but effective piece of data visualization, created by the folks at design studio TWO-N, which represents the first four-million digits of Pi in a brilliant mess of interactive pointillism.
Each digit, from 0-9, was assigned a color based on the legend pictured here, and then rendered as a single, 1x1 pixel. Line the pixels up in the order designated by Pi, confine them to a 4-millon pixel image, and you get this interactive applet here, which lets you soar around the entire image, inspecting 500,000-digit sections at a clip. There’s even an interesting search function that lets you probe the mathematical mosaic for number up to eight digits in length. [TWO-N via information aesthetics]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m30hs5FwG31qbkzabo1_250.jpg)
Ingredients of life
Illustrations of Chemical compounds by Rex
An ultra-cool set of posters! Dopamine is the one I am most familiar with and it’s a very interesting chemical not only because it causes our emotional responses, but because it controls the ‘reward system’ of our brain which in turn motivates us to repeat actions that we enjoy (even if they are not good for our overall health, as is the case with chemical addiction).
But rather than dwelling too much on the more serious effects of these chemical responses, focus more on the greatness of the posters!
