Science

Pi Pie Chart

Rebecca Watson March 14, 2013
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For today’s special Pi Day version of Bad Chart Thursday, I present to you the distribution of digits in the first 1,000 decimal places of pi, presented as a pie chart:

pi pie

Remarkably, when I Googled for this, I was only able to find the frequency of digits in pi represented in bar charts, which is obviously a ridiculous thing to do, considering the pun opportunities. So, fixed.

As an accompaniment, please enjoy this related clip from How I Met Your Mother:

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By Rebecca Watson
Rebecca leads a team of skeptical female activists at Skepchick.org and appears on the weekly Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast. She travels around the world delivering entertaining talks on science, atheism, feminism, and skepticism. There is currently an asteroid orbiting the sun with her name on it. You can follow her every fascinating move on Twitter: @rebeccawatson.

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10 Comments

  1. Jack Leonard  /  March 14, 2013, 7:03 pm

    I fail to see what is bad about this chart.

  2. willradik  /  March 14, 2013, 7:04 pm

    But… But this is a GOOD chart! Where is the bad chart? Oh I guess maybe it’s the bar graph.

  3. Rebecca Watson  /  March 14, 2013, 7:41 pm

    But it’s 3D! Everyone hates 3D charts!

    • Jim Wile  /  March 14, 2013, 8:19 pm

      Only when they are about 3D movies. How can a pie chart about Pi ever be bad?

  4. Eucliwood Hellscythe  /  March 14, 2013, 7:59 pm

    I actually think the chart is kind of purty. :3 Both of em.

  5. Jim Wile  /  March 14, 2013, 8:21 pm

    Have to say – that is probably my favorite “How I Met Your Mother”. My buddy Doug would have loved it! Let’s make a pie chart about pie charts! Classic!

    • Otoki  /  March 14, 2013, 10:02 pm

      That show has so very very many excellent episodes, and making charts by hand is one of my guilty pleasures, so of COURSE that’s one of the best episodes.

  6. Jackal  /  March 14, 2013, 10:04 pm

    I did a similar project using the first 200 million digits of pi. The digits came out uniformly distributed at 10.00% each, but I didn’t have a way of verifying that the data I was analyzing were the actual digits of pi.

    • penguinsdemise  /  March 15, 2013, 8:33 am

      That sounds right. The numbers of pi are thought to be completely random (though this has not been proven), so 10% of each makes sense.

  7. Bjornar  /  March 15, 2013, 12:01 pm

    One’s number one! One’s number one!

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