The entrance to the Downsview subway station in Toronto presents visitors with a striking vista. A vast mosaic of square tiles sweeps across a curved wall, inviting viewers to trace its lines and ponder intriguing irregularities in its color scheme of blues, greens, roses, and other hues.
Of the hordes of people who hurry through the station, perhaps only a few take a moment or two to contemplate the curious blend of the regular and the seemingly random in the bands of this cryptic, ethereal spectrum writ large. Far fewer people even suspect that the artist responsible for this mosaic based her remarkable design on the decimal digits of the number pi (p), the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.