Walking on Real Numbers

Our Story of Press Coverage

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At the beginning of June 2012 we submitted our paper to The Mathematical Intelligencer. We also sent our preprint version to several colleagues, and some of them started tweeting it. A few days later, Christian Perfect told us that he was going to write a post in The Aperiodical, a mathematical blog that he started in 2008. David Bailey and Jon Borwein also wrote a post in their blog Math Drudge. Some days later a colleague told us that our project was featured on Wired! This article by Samuel Arbesman was tweeted by many people. Three days later we noticed that a good number of tweets were written in Japanese. It turns out that our work was also featured on Wired Japan! The post reached the first position both in the ranking of news and in the hottest topic list during several days.

We decided to submit our picture of the walk on 100 billion digits of π to the National Science Foundation International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2012. Our picture was one of the ten finalists in the Illustration category.

In January 2013 the picture of π appeared on Gizmodo, in the section “What Is This?” where the readers must guess what the image is. Several readers guessed it right, probably after seeing the picture before. This made the GigaPan picture even more popular, reaching more than 20,000 views (at the moment, it has been seen more than 50,000 times). The GigaPan administrators decided to write an article about our Success Story.

In April 2013 David Bailey and Jon Borwein wrote an article for the Huffington Post regarding the randomness of the digits of π, and they featured our project. Another colleague informed us that our work was also featured in the Spiegel Online.

An article about the 100-billion-step walk appeared in both the print and online versions of Wired UK's August 2013 issue.

Further coverage was received in The Guardian, on Pi Day, 2014.

Complete Links

• The Guardian — Pi Day: pi transformed into incredible art — in pictures (March 14^th, 2014)
• Wired UK — Spot a shape and reinvent maths (August, 2013)
• Spiegel — Rätselhafte Kreiszahl: In Pi könnte Goethes "Faust" stecken (April 29^th, 2013)
• Huffingtonpost — Are the Digits of Pi Random? (April 6^th, 2013)
• GigaPan Success Story (February 14^th, 2013)
• Gizmodo — What is this? (January 10^th, 2013)
• NSF Visualization Challenge (November, 2013; finalist in the Illustration category)
• Wired Japan — A random walk with pi (June 15^th, 2012)
• Math Drudge — New paper on visualizing digits of pi (June 13^th, 2012)
• Wired — A random walk with pi (June 12^th, 2012)
• The Aperiodical — WLTM real number. Must be normal and enjoy long walks on the plane (June 7^th, 2012)