Archie Hayes Stephen Hawking’s death is sobering amidst cheap puns, baked-pie homages, and also the nation’s fleeting appreciation for a long series of irrational numbers; everyone celebrates Pi day differently. Some acknowledge the trillion-digit decimal’s infinite beauty for a few seconds, while others, such as Martijn Koomen and Tadas Maksimovas get to work designing and constructing a fully functional fixed-gear bicycle in tribute to an inexplicable, mathematical constant.
That the pi bicycle is a carbon fiber fix. Its framework — highlighted in its layout — has been modeled in the form of the mathematical symbol, pi, which, again, reflects the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. After being inspired by Malaysian illustrator, Yau Hoong’s drawings of a pi-shaped bicycle (picycle), Koomen and Makimovas decided to accept the challenge of creating the 2D example into an actual, fully working bike. In collaboration with we’re pi, the designers sketched, substituted, throw, sanded, assembled, recast, and reassembled it all over again, before the pi bike had been the pleasant, overpowering, ridable, carbon fiber design that you see.
