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`\pi` Day 2019 Art Posters - Digits, internationally.
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.
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
—Willian Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1)
Welcome to this year's celebration of `\pi` and mathematics.
The theme this year is typographical and pure—in contrast to last year's extremely elaborate computational art. This year is also the first time I have made a special kids' edition!
This year's poem is by Viorica Hrincu and it is about complications.
This year's `\pi` day song is Tshinanu by Kashtin.
If you enjoy art based on type, explore my other typographical works.
`\pi` day — kids edition!
Several teachers have reached out to me in the past and asked for art to hang in their classrooms. So I thought what better way to get kids excited and talking (and reading) about math than with an explosion of colors and phat fonts.
The international kids' poster uses the following languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Danish, Dothraki, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Frisian, Galician, German, Gongduk, Haitian/Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Huastec/Mayan, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Khasi, Ladan, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Nao, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Puyuma, Ro, Samoan, Scots/Gaelic, Sesotho, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Solon, Solresol, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tenerife, Tetun, Turkish, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zenaga, and Zulu.
Some of these languages are fictional or engineered—I'll leave it to you to find them.
The posters read out the digits of `\pi` in a variety of languages. For this version of the art, I've selected language digit words that have no diacritical marks—to fit the letters more tightly.
for everybody
Adults shouldn't feel left out—they're free to enjoy the `\pi` Day kids' editions (I know I want to).
However, for the more discerning typographer in you (if Granby Elephant is too bloated for your eyes), I have prepared something slimmer.
These posters spell out the digits of `\pi` in a variety of languages and alphabets. I'll leave you to work out the rule for the red highlights.
The following languages are used: Afrikaans, Ainu, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Avestan, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Banjar, Bengali, Biblical Arameic, Buginese, Bulgarian, Bumthang, Catalan, Cherokee, Chinese, Cia-cia, Coptic, Czech, Danish, Dothraki, English, Esperanto, Etruscan, Frisian, Galician, Gaulish, Georgian, Georgian Old, Gothic, Greek Old, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hopi, Hungarian, Igbo, Inuktitut, Irish, Japanese Sino, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Klallam, Korean, Korean Sino, Kyrgyz, Ladan, Ladino, Lao, Latvian, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Mandaic, Mongolian Classical, Myanmar, Norse, Norwegian, Old English, Old Turkic, Pashto, Persian, Phoenician, Proto Germanic, Punjabi, Ro, Romanian, Samaritan, Samoan, Sanskrit, Sesotho, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slavonic, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Sylheti, Syriac, Tajik, Telugu, Tetun, Thai, Thompson, Turkish, Ugaritic, Urdu, Welsh, Wyandot, Xhosa, Yi, Yiddish, and Yonaguni.
The typeface is Helvetica Neue or Noto Sans.
In another version of the poster, instead of using words to spell out the digits, I use digit glyphs from various alphabets. Included in this version are also any single-glyph words for the digit.
The digit glyph poster uses Adlam, Ainu, Arabic, Balinese, Bengali, Brahmi, Burmese, Chakma, Cham, Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopic, Gujaranti, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Japanese Sino, Javanese, Kannada, Kayahli, Kharoshthi, Khmer, Klingon, Korean, Koreansino, Lao, Lepcha, Limbu, Malayalam, Meetei Mayek, Mongolian, Nko, Odia, Olchiki, Oriya, Osmanya, Punjabi, Roman, Rumi, Sanskrit, Saurashtra, Shan, Sinhala, Sinhala Archaic, Sumerian, Sundanese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Vai, Yi, and Yonaguni.
Happy 2025 π Day—
TTCAGT: a sequence of digits
Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and sequence digits like its 1999. Let's call some peaks.
Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance
I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player
Points of Significance is an ongoing series of short articles about statistics in Nature Methods that started in 2013. Its aim is to provide clear explanations of essential concepts in statistics for a nonspecialist audience. The articles favor heuristic explanations and make extensive use of simulated examples and graphical explanations, while maintaining mathematical rigor.
Topics range from basic, but often misunderstood, such as uncertainty and P-values, to relatively advanced, but often neglected, such as the error-in-variables problem and the curse of dimensionality. More recent articles have focused on timely topics such as modeling of epidemics, machine learning, and neural networks.
In this article, we discuss the evolution of topics and details behind some of the story arcs, our approach to crafting statistical explanations and narratives, and our use of figures and numerical simulations as props for building understanding.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2025) Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 12:69–87.
Propensity score matching
I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player
In many experimental designs, we need to keep in mind the possibility of confounding variables, which may give rise to bias in the estimate of the treatment effect.
If the control and experimental groups aren't matched (or, roughly, similar enough), this bias can arise.
Sometimes this can be dealt with by randomizing, which on average can balance this effect out. When randomization is not possible, propensity score matching is an excellent strategy to match control and experimental groups.
Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) Points of significance: Propensity score matching. Nat. Methods 21:1770–1772.
Understanding p-values and significance
P-values combined with estimates of effect size are used to assess the importance of experimental results. However, their interpretation can be invalidated by selection bias when testing multiple hypotheses, fitting multiple models or even informally selecting results that seem interesting after observing the data.
We offer an introduction to principled uses of p-values (targeted at the non-specialist) and identify questionable practices to be avoided.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2024) Understanding p-values and significance. Laboratory Animals 58:443–446.
Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars
Variability is inherent in most biological systems due to differences among members of the population. Two types of variation are commonly observed in studies: differences among samples and the “error” in estimating a population parameter (e.g. mean) from a sample. While these concepts are fundamentally very different, the associated variation is often expressed using similar notation—an interval that represents a range of values with a lower and upper bound.
In this article we discuss how common intervals are used (and misused).
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2024) Depicting variability and uncertainty using intervals and error bars. Laboratory Animals 58:453–456.
Nasa to send our human genome discs to the Moon
We'd like to say a ‘cosmic hello’: mathematics, culture, palaeontology, art and science, and ... human genomes.
