Data Art in R: A case study using a bunch of pi digits
Happy Pi Day everyone!
Many people have done data art with pi digits (see this awesome collection of data art in R)–but I wanted to see if I could reproduce it myself by hacking some code together and am fairly pleased with the results. I think a couple of these images might become my new desktop wallpaper :)
Concept: Plot a “random walk” of sorts where the angle (amount of rotation) of the step which the random walker takes depends on the digit in the sequence.
|1| Download a million digits of pi from this website. Get it into a dataframe with one digit in each row.
|2| Create a dataframe that indicates the x- and y-locations for each digit. This step is a bit tricky… Basically draw a circle and split it up into equal parts and figure out the x- and y-distances for the center point of the circle to get there… The legend below should help.
|3| Merge the dataframes from steps 1 and 2.
|4| Plot the individual line segments via a for loop. VoilĂ !
First 11 digits of pi
First 101 digits of pi
First 1001 digits of pi
First 10001 digits of pi
First 100001 digits of pi
You can find the R script (make_a_pi.R
) to create these figures here.