home>In Silico Flurries — A Snowflake Catalogue>Families of snowflakes

thermodynamics + art

The 2020 π Day art celebrates the digits of π with piku (パイク) — poetry inspired by haiku. They serve as the form for The Outbreak Poems. On our 2022 Pi Day album "three one four: a number of notes", a piku accompanies each track.

It's Snowing in my CPU — a Snowflake catalogue

She was all stars and arrows, squares and triangles of ice and light, like a church window; she was like a flower with many shining petals; she was like lace and she was like a diamond. But best of all, she was herself and unlike any of her kind.
— Paul Gallico, Snowflake

Somewhere in the world, it's snowing. But you don't need to go far—it's always snowing on this page. Explore random flurries, snowflake families and individual flakes. There are many unusual snowflakes and snowflake family 12 and family 46 are very interesting.

But don't settle for only pixel snowflakes—make an STL file and 3D print your own flakes!

Ad blockers may interfere with some flake images—the names of flakes can trigger ad filters.

And if after reading about my flakes you want more, get your frozen fix with Kenneth Libbrecht's excellent work and Paul Gallico's Snowflake.

≡ random sample families snowland flake oddities posters scientific american 3D print credits & code

flake families

Flakes are grouped into 50 families using k-means clustering. Families are ordered by the number of flakes in each family—family 1 has the largest number of flakes and family 50 the smallest.

The flakes below are random samples from each family.