Today is Pi Day. It’s not Pie Day, although you’re welcome to celebrate with pastry. Today’s Pi is a letter of the Greek alphabet that symbolizes an important value: an irrational number defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Just how something can be both a ratio and irrational is beyond my comprehension, but Pi’s infinite digits start with 3.14. Today is 3/14, and so it’s Pi Day. It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
Thus we could regard this as Math Geek Day, to honor the people who can reckon the stresses on a suspension bridge or calculate a trajectory to the moon. There was a time when I aspired to that; in ninth grade I memorized Pi to 35 places, and can still rattle it off to impress people who are not easily bored.
But my hope of Math Geekdom — breezing through algebra, geometry and trigonometry — ended when I encountered calculus. I had so much trouble with integrals and derivatives that I became an English major.
Even so, Pi is still a fascination, and if you want to know more of its lore, find “A History of Pi” by the late Petr Beckmann, who taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado.
I was prepared to point out, in light of the suggested detour around slide-damaged Glenwood Canyon, that the last place to look for math geeks is the Colorado Department of Transportation.
That’s because CDOT’s mileage signs violate the geometric principle that distance is the same no matter which direction you measure it. According to the CDOT sign on the east side of Gunnison, it’s 65 miles to Salida. But if you start in Salida, it’s 5 miles to Poncha Springs, where the sign proclaims that Gunnison is 66 miles away, making 71 miles from Salida to Gunnison.
Now ponder CDOT’s suggested detour for a journey from Denver to Grand Junction, a 248-mile trip if Interstate 70 is open. With Glenwood Canyon closed, you drive 133 miles to Wolcott, turn north to Steamboat Springs, west to Craig, then south through Meeker to Rifle before returning to I-70. All told, it’s 407 miles.
That’s about 80 miles longer than U.S. 285 from Denver to Poncha Springs, then west on U.S. 50 to Grand Junction. So does CDOT have trouble with numbers, or is there some other reason for suggesting the longer detour?
As it turns out, CDOT hopes drivers will use both routes, but “there is a method to our madness,” according to Rodrick L. Mead, operations manager at the Colorado Transportation Management Center in Golden.
For one thing, the shorter route involves crossing 11,306-foot Monarch Pass, which has been hit by recent storms. Sending people that way, “then having them sit for another hour or two for avalanche control, wouldn’t be too popular.”
Further, the north route “is also a lot easier for commercial transportation,” since its roads “tend to have better sight distance and less narrow curves due to the geography.” So there were factors other than mere distance.
Besides, it suits me if detoured I-70 traffic gets routed to some other part of the state — or even to Wyoming, for that matter.
Whichever detour drivers take, it should be educational for motorists who don’t remember when all mountain highways were two-lane nerve-wracking travails, and you didn’t set out without tire chains, tow chains, jumper cables, blankets, water and food.
There is a civilized alternative if you must cross our state in the winter — the bar car of Amtrak’s California Zephyr, which offers excellent views of Glenwood Canyon and much else. And while rolling in comfort, you can examine the circular rim of your glass and contemplate the transcendental value of Pi.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
