Image courtesy of ISHKY

For all you architecture buffs, Pi Day might conjure visions of the Guggenheim Museum, the Apple spaceship, and much of Oscar Niemeyer’s oeuvre—all pi shoo-ins. (For those who need a math refresher: Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter.) But 3/14 is also a great occasion for celebrating the number’s infinite string of digits with parades, skywriting, and, yes, pie. As part of last fall’s ZERO1 Biennial in Silicon Valley, the artist ISHKY commanded a team of five synchronized aircraft to skywrite the digits of pi in a loop around San Francisco Bay. Flying at 10,000 feet, the fleet puffed out the beloved ratio, dot-matrix style, in numbers spanning a quarter of a mile in height. Find the circumference after the jump!

Had the weather permitted, the pi planes would be taking off for a second iteration of Pi in the Sky today at 1:59 p.m. ISHKY will reschedule the flight for a clearer day, but in the meantime we have documentation of the first excursion. And some news about pi’s next act: Pi will be piggybacking on a satellite slated for launch by a Bay Area startup in late April. ISHKY is working with developers on an app that will stream the digits of spacebound pi back to Earth and allow devotees of the ubiquitous ratio to keep tabs on its progress. “Pi will be represented as if the Earth were a ball of string which pi is constantly wrapping,” the artist says in a video about Pi in the Sky. ”It blows the sense of scale beyond anything I can imagine to millions and millions of miles.”

Photo via Pi in the Sky

In the meantime, pi fans in San Francisco can head over to the Exploratorium for a 14-minute pi parade, which will culminate (appropriately) at 1:59 p.m. PST and segue into servings of actual pie.

Photo: nomadjim via Flickr

by Lamar Anderson

posted in news Uncategorized

tagged ISHKY, math, mathematics, pi, public art, San Francisco, silicon valley, The Exploratorium

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