You never know how random information will connect with you; you see, immediately after I've completed my pi day project each year, I start looking for new ideas and inspiration for next year. Visualizations and wordplay, in particular, get my creative juices flowing. A few years ago, a quick google of "pi images" led me to Daniel Tammet.
Talk about a fascinating person! Daniel Tammet calls himself a "writer, linguist and educator," but he is perhaps best known for reciting pi to 22,514 decimal places from memory, taking 5 hours and slightly over 9 minutes to complete his task in 2004. Tammet's memoir, Born on a Blue Day, details his life "outside the box" as an autistic savant and a synesthete: not only is he gifted with extraordinary abilities, he is also successful at communicating them. Daniel Tammet offers us the real gift of seeing his differences not as disabilities, and not as genius - but as the very human experience of making life work with the tools you are given.
As I said, Mr. Tammet is a synesthete: he experiences numbers with particular textures and colors. If you follow the link to his website, you will find illustrations of his visualizations. Today's pi day pie will focus on his painting "Pi Landscape," which you can buy from his website as a set of postcards. When I saw this recipe from Saveur, I realized the painting reminded me of colored meringue, and the idea for this recipe was born. Unfortunately, the colors he used are not especially conducive to natural colors and flavors (to me, relying on food color alone would be cheating, but if you want to try it that way, it would certainly be easier) so I hope Mr. Tammet will forgive my pie's weak approximation of his pi.
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I created a map using axial symmetry to help Mr. Tammet's painting come to life. I created a series of circular two-dimensional patterns that could be expressed in 9 three-dimension layers, which would make a two-dimensional version of the pi landscape painting on the faces of a radial segment of my cylander. (Deep breath.) In plainer English, I made drawings of concentric circles that, when copied in meringue layers, would create a cylander. A wedge cut from this cylander should have an approximate copy of "Pi Landscape" on each cut side, or face.
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Don't forget to also enter it in Scoochmaroo's Green Challenge. Just copy and paste a link to this Ible in the comment section.
The deadline is midnight tonight, so hurry... and good luck!!!