Why bi visibility matters
October 3rd, 2024
4 min
Datawrapper lets you show your data as beautiful charts, maps or tables with a few clicks. Find out more about all the available visualization types.
Our mission is to help everyone communicate with data - from newsrooms to global enterprises, non-profits or public service.
We want to enable everyone to create beautiful charts, maps, and tables. New to data visualization? Or do you have specific questions about us? You'll find all the answers here.
Data vis best practices, news, and examples
250+ articles that explain how to use Datawrapper
Answers to common questions
An exchange place for Datawrapper visualizations
Attend and watch how to use Datawrapper best
Learn about available positions on our team
Our latest small and big improvements
Build your integration with Datawrapper's API
Get in touch with us – we're happy to help
This article is brought to you by Datawrapper, a data visualization tool for creating charts, maps, and tables. Learn more.
It’s the 14th day of the 3rd month of the year. Which means it’s pi day today! Pi, that really long number with the weird symbol π that you learned about in school because it had something to do with circles. To remind ourselves: The circumference of a circle is π times bigger than its diameter – or, to give the first hundred numbers of pi some space,
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679...
times bigger. By now, 31 trillion decimal places of pi are known (not that we’d need that many, but you know, it’s nice to break records). The chart above shows the first 10,000.
It shows how often each number between 0 and 9 appears. As we can see, they don’t reach an equal share yet in these first 10,000 digits. In fact, that happens surprisingly late: Of an astonishing 10 million pi digits, the number 4 makes up 10.011% of them and the number 1 “only” 9.993%. Here we can see how the shares become more equal with every magnitude:
Maybe you wonder how I got the numbers for the first chart. The pi digits are known (e.g. here), but how did I find out the distribution of numbers for the first 1000 digits, the first 1001 digits, the first 1002 digits, etc.?
It’s a simple Excel formula! (I was really happy when I realized it’s possible to do this with Excel; I wouldn’t have wanted to unpack R for this…) Here it is:=100/1002*((LEN(LEFT(A1,1002)))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(A1,1002),"0","")))
This formula tells us the share of zeros in the first 1002 digits of pi, assuming that we put our pi digits in cell A1
. Try it yourself, or copy my spreadsheet with numbers between 100 and 10,000 digits.
If you don’t have enough of pi charts yet, visit data visualization designer Nadieh Bremer’s wonderful 2015 project “Exploring the art hidden in π” (and an animation of it here) or this Guardian article published on pi day 2014. Next week, I’ll finally tell you about these ngram numbers I promised you for this week. See you then!
Comments