`\pi` Day 2018 Art Posters - Stitched city road maps from around the world

On March 14th celebrate `\pi` Day. Hug `\pi`—find a way to do it.

For those who favour `\tau=2\pi` will have to postpone celebrations until July 26th. That's what you get for thinking that `\pi` is wrong. I sympathize with this position and have `\tau` day art too!

If you're not into details, you may opt to party on July 22nd, which is `\pi` approximation day (`\pi` ≈ 22/7). It's 20% more accurate that the official `\pi` day!

Finally, if you believe that `\pi = 3`, you should read why `\pi` is not equal to 3.

And if you've got to sleep a moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I'll disappear for you
—Leonard Cohen (I'm Your Man)

This year's is the 30th anniversary of `\pi` day. The theme of the art is bridging the world and making friends. So myself I again team up with my long-time friend and collaborator Jake Lever. I worled with Jake on the snowflake catalogue, where we build a world of flakes.

And so, this year we also build a world. We start with all the roads in the world and stitch them together in brand new ways. And if you walk more than 1 km in this world, you'll likely to be transported somewhere completely different.

This year's `\pi` day song is Trance Groove: Paris. Why? Because it's worth to go to new places—real or imagined.

Last year, I made a new world in the sky with my 2017 `\pi` day sky charts. This year, it's time for something a little closer to the ground. Using street maps of various cities, we rearrange the streets and join neighbourhoods from around the world using the digits of `\pi` as a recipe.

A walk from to Istanbul to San Francisco is only 5 minutes? Well, no. But what if it could be.

Read how it was done or simply enjoy the art.

City strips

City strips are horizontal arrangements of patches of roads sampled from a city. The order of the patches is determined by the digits of `\pi`, which are used to select regions of specific density of roads.

These strips chart 10 patches—the patch for the digit "1" has a few roads and the patch for "9" is the most dense.

Boonies, burbs and boutiques

This series of patches is extracted from the city strips above. Three patches for the consecutive digits 159 are shown and demonstrate how very quickly we can progress from nowhere to somewhere.

World patches

This arrangement of roads builds on city strips. Here, 36 digits of `\pi` are arranged on a 6 × 6 grid. Roads patches are sampled from 10 different cities—each digit is assigned a different city.

In the map below the digit-to-city assignments are: 0:Amsterdam, 1:Doha, 2:Marrakesh, 3:Mumbai, 4:Nairobi, 5:Rome, 6:San Francisco, 7:Seoul, 8:Shanghai and 9:Vancouver.

City mix

City mixes are world patches that only use two cities. Below we assign the even digits to Melbourne and the odd digits to Nice.