First 1000 Digits of Pi Posters

Earlier this month I put up these digits of pi posters in the hallway outside my classroom.

They sparked a lot of great questions and conversations with my students, other students, and other teachers in the building.  I blogged about some of these conversations here.

In case anyone may be interested, I thought I'd share the file I used.  To create the posters, all I did was google the first 1,000 digits of pi, which I copied and pasted into a Word document.  I enlarged them until each digit filled a page and I added the ellipsis at the end of the document.

After determining that I could fit a 7 by 14 array of digits on the wall, I needed to print the first 97 pages of the document, plus page 1,003 for the ellipsis.  I knew that I wanted each digit to be a different color, so I arranged my colored paper on the floor like this.

I used my Word document of poster pages to determine the pattern of numbers where I would stop - so I looked at pages 93-97 to know that I was ending with the digits 3, 4, 2, 1, 1.  Then I went back to the webpage showing the digits of pi (rather than clicking through each page of my document) to start arranging the colored papers in order.  I inserted white pages for the decimal point and the ellipsis.  By having the colored paper in order of the digits of pi, I was able to simply put that stack of paper in the printer and print pages 1-97 and page 1,003 of my document.

Here are a few more printing tips:

• Make sure you're set to print single-sided.
• Print a custom selection of pages using the hyphen to include the pages of digits you want to print and a comma to also list the ellipsis page (p. 1003).
• Be sure that you know if your printer starts printing with the first page of a selection and prints forward through the selection or if your printer starts with the last page of a selection and moves backward through the selection (if you don't know, print a short selection on scrap paper to find out).

You'll need the free font Comic Zine for the Word document to display correctly (or feel free to change the font to something else - you may also have to adjust the page margins and font size if you do that).

View/Download: First 1000 Digits of Pi Posters