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Make your own Tau-shirt

Posted 12 years ago
If, like me, you missed Tau Day a few months back, you can still celebrate everyone's favourite underdog numerical constant. So let's make a "?-shirt" to counter those all those lame Pi shirts.

Here's how to make a Tau shirt in Mathematica.

Start by getting some digits of tau:
digits = Characters @ ToString[N[2*Pi, 10000]];

Now let's draw a really big Tau, and turn it into an array of pixels:
tau = Style["?", FontSize -> 128, FontFamily -> "Times"];
tau = Binarize @ Rasterize @ tau;

Next, all we have to do is walk through the pixels in raster order, creating the next glyph at the location of each successive black pixel:
i = 1;
glyphs = MapIndexed[
  If[#1 == 0, Text[ digits[[i++]], {1,-1.3} * Reverse[#2] ]&,
  ImageData[tau], {2}
];

And render with a cool font:
Graphics[Style[glyphs, FontFamily -> "Ubuntu"], ImageSize -> 420]


Now to PDF for printing (and thence to https://www.shirts.io/).
Export["?.pdf", %]

Unfortunately the font isn't preserved, but the fight for tau equality was never going to be easy.
POSTED BY: Taliesin Beynon
3 Replies
Nice! You found my very first (and last) Wolfram blog post..

Here's a nice extension of the idea, as a challenge: recursive T-shirt.

In other words, a T-shirt that features me wearing a T-shirt featuring me wearing a T-shirt, etc...

Surely not as hard as this amazing blogpost by John McLoone.

P.S. Why doesn't this forum use Ajax to speed things up a bit? Is commercial forum software this backward?
POSTED BY: Taliesin Beynon
Hi Pete, Welcome to Community! I think you need to take a look at The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl. And, btw, in the first video there you can see the grandeur tau-shirt he is wearing.

Great post, Tali! I think there should be a tali-constant with a quite complex outline for the symbol, - so that the t-shirt would look like something similar to the below. Now I especially did not post the output, because it is the enigma for you to uncover ;-)
ImageCompose[
  ImageTake[ImageResize[Import["http://goo.gl/0bCvLX"], 500], {70, 320}, {230, 500}],
  ColorNegate[EdgeDetect[Import["http://goo.gl/lnuMog"]]]]
For those who puzzled about what is going on you should take a good look at the author of this blog post about Turing machines ;)
POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov
Posted 12 years ago
tau = 2*Pi
this is an "underdog" constant?
can u explain?!?
POSTED BY: pete p
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