Much like any ordinary child, I spent much of my childhood watching math videos on YouTube. During this time I discovered many channels that you might already be familiary with: 3Blue1Brown, Numberphile, Stand-up Maths, and many, many others. I credit these videos with inspiring me to continue my fascination with mathematics. However, one of these channels rises above all others in terms of how it shaped me: Vihart.
Vi's videos, although lacking in pixels, more than make up for it with their humor, art, music, and beautiful introductions into various mathematics concepts that one would be lucky to even mention in a school curriculum. These videos introduced me to $\tau$ (tau) - the superior circle constant, equal to the ratio between a circle's circumference and its radius (two times $\pi$). Each day this June, leading up to June 28 (tau day), I will be posting a creative demonstration of the beauty of this constant, circles, and mathematics as a whole.
All code used to generate these visualizations will be available on GitHub the same day the blog post is released.
Labyrinth
This image shows the digits of tau (as represented in a base-10 positional system) by assigning each one an angle, where 0 is directly right and each subsequent digit is $\frac{\tau}{10}$ radians counterclockwise. The first digit is right next to the center, and following digits are further out and connected by arcs.