Riddle: When is a bar chart really a pie chart?

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Did you know that this Friday is Pi Day? How are you planning to commemorate this special day? :)

Next year's Pi Day might even be more special than usual, being that it will contain: March 14, 2015 - 9:26:53. And if you realize the coolness of that (3.141592653), you might be a piphilologist! Probably the most famous piphilologist these days is the young guy in the movie Life of Pi, who entertained and impressed his roommates by writing the value of pi out to many digits on the classroom chalkboards.

And in my quest to impress you guys, I'm going to attempt something similar with SAS/Graph. This was a tough mission, but here's what I came up with ... a bar chart that shows the value of pi, truncated to various numbers of characters. The number of characters is represented by the length of the bars, and the pi-value is also annotated on each bar. Making it a bar chart that's really a pi chart! :)

You can click the graph above to see the interactive version with html hover-text … And as a bonus, if you have an iPad, you turn on Voice Over mode and hear each value read out to you as you run your finger over the bars – how cool, eh!

Now it's your turn - tell us what you have done in celebration of Pi Day!

 

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About Author

Robert Allison

The Graph Guy!

Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.

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3 Comments

    • Robert Allison
      Robert Allison on

      Being a little OCD, I felt compelled to correct my blog, and point out the special 'Pi' date/time is *next* year (not this year). Thank you for catching that! :)

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