A Pi Day reflection — March 14

Today is Pi Day. March 14. 3/14. The first three digits of π. I personally love Pi, it is maybe the coolest thing ever besides the golden ration in my book.

Pi day started in 1987 as a physicist’s joke at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Larry Shaw noticed the date matched the constant, organized a small celebration, and somehow it stuck. Thirty-nine years later it’s a global phenomenon. People are eating pie and arguing about whether math is beautiful. I think math is beautiful. And I think π has something worth saying to makers.

First, let’s clear something up.

People often lump π and the golden ratio together as if they’re the same idea, the universe’s hidden design secrets, ancient proportions woven into great art. They’re not the same at all.

The golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618) is about proportion, how to divide something so the parts relate to the whole in a specific, harmonious way. It shows up in Fibonacci spirals, in certain shell structures, and it’s been applied (with varying degrees of accuracy) to everything from the Parthenon to da Vinci’s compositions. Designers reach for it when they want visual balance.

Pi (π ≈ 3.14159…) is something entirely different. It’s about circles, specifically, the relationship between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. Draw any circle, anywhere, any size. Divide its circumference by its diameter. You always get π. Always. It never changes, no matter how large or small the circle, no matter where in the universe you draw it.

That constancy is what gets me.

Where π actually lives in art and making

π isn’t a design principle the way the golden ratio is. Nobody sketched a portrait using pi as a guide. But it shows up everywhere making happens, quietly, structurally, as a consequence of working with curves and circles.

In architecture, π lives in every arch, every dome, every rose window, every oculus. When the Pantheon’s perfect circular opening frames the sky. When Gothic cathedrals pierce their stone walls with wheels of light. When a potter throws a bowl on a wheel. π is present not as a choice, but as a consequence of the circle itself.

In music, composers and mathematicians have mapped π’s digits directly to musical notes, 3 becomes D, 1 becomes A, 4 becomes E, and so on, producing haunting, non-repeating melodies that technically go on forever. There’s something in that idea worth sitting with: an infinite composition that follows strict rules but never repeats itself. Not random. Not patterned. Something else.

In visual art, contemporary artists have built entire bodies of work from π’s digits,  circular data visualizations, color sequences driven by each decimal place, abstract patterns that sprawl outward from a center. The resulting images are genuinely beautiful. And because π is irrational, they never repeat. Every inch of the pattern is unique.

In poetry, there’s a form called Pilish, where the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of π. “How I wish I could recalculate pi”, count the letters: 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6. It’s constraint as creative engine, which is one of the oldest tricks in the maker’s toolbox.

In ceramics, printmaking, weaving, woodworking, anywhere a circle, a curve, a wheel, a coil enters the work, π is there. Silent. Reliable. Constant.

The thing I keep returning to

π is irrational. That’s a technical term, it means it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction, and its decimal digits go on forever without ever settling into a repeating pattern. 3.14159265358979… and on, and on, infinitely.

We’ve calculated π to more than 100 trillion digits. We will never reach the end. There is no end.

And yet π describes something as simple and complete as a circle.

I think about that in the studio a lot. The things that feel most whole, most resolved, most finished, they’re often rooted in something that doesn’t fully resolve. A question that stays open. A tension that isn’t released but held. The work looks complete from the outside. But underneath it is π: something infinite, still going, still unfolding.

The best creative work I’ve made, and the best work I’ve encountered in others, has that quality. It doesn’t explain itself completely. It holds more than it shows. You can return to it and find something new, the way the digits of π keep going whether you’re looking or not.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the nature of the circle.

A small practice for today

If you make things with your hands, or your voice, or your eye, or your words, find a circle today. Not to use it. Just to look at it.

The rim of your coffee cup. A wheel. A coil of wire. An iris. The way a brushstroke curves back toward itself.

Notice that every circle, every single one, contains π. Not approximately. Exactly. An infinite, non-repeating number, perfectly encoded in the most ordinary shapes in the world.

Making is like that too. The practice looks simple from the outside. But there’s no bottom to it. You can keep going as long as you’re willing to stay curious.

Happy Pi Day.

Now lets go make something round.