Pi/Pie Day funfest hits Huntridge Circle Park

It was Pi Day, so Billy Logan and JoNell Thomas brought cherry and apple.

Others came with peach and blackberry and key lime, laying them out on folding tables on a perfect Saturday morning in the most appropriate place imaginable: Huntridge Circle Park.

“It’s wrong to celebrate Pi Day at home by yourself,” joked Thomas, who organized the small event in her historic downtown neighborhood.

Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, a mathematical constant that goes on forever but is commonly approximated as 3.14159.

A physicist in San Francisco named Larry Shaw is credited with the idea of celebrating Pi Day each March 14. The tradition dates back to 1988, but this year is special. Once every century, the calendar lands on 3-14-15, allowing math enthusiasts to mark pi to the 10th digit and beyond, depending on how good your stopwatch is.

When the time came Saturday, the group of about 20 party-goers at Circle Park formed a loose circle around the folding tables and counted down to the once-in-a-lifetime moment: 9:26 and 53 seconds, or 3.141592653.

“Anybody feel the ground shaking?” said Las Vegas City Councilman Bob Coffin, who grew up in the Huntridge Neighborhood and still lives there.

Coffin came in a suit and couldn’t stay long. He was on his way to the funeral for former Councilman and Clark County Commissioner Paul Christensen.

“Circle of life,” someone said as Coffin left.

In mathematical circles, pi is considered both irrational and transcendental. This thing in Circle Park was your basic neighborhood potluck.

There were eight pies, two quiches, and several boxes filled with muffins, minicheesecakes and donuts, most of them round. The plates and cups also were round, but that could have been a coincidence.

The gluten-free key lime pie with the pi symbol on top was homemade. Logan and JoNell’s pies came from Costco, and they weren’t exactly circular.

Logan shrugged it off. “Nothing can be completely round. It’s just an ideal, right?”

Circle Park isn’t even a circle. The 3-acre expanse of grass and trees in the middle of Maryland Parkway, just south Charleston Boulevard, is almond-shaped and rough around edges. It attracts far more homeless people than math nerds.

One Pi Day participant, who in the spirit of neighborliness won’t be named here, said he hadn’t been to the park since the 1970s, when he went there to score some weed.

Not ideal, maybe, but good enough for a gathering like this.

“What a beautiful day for pie, isn’t it?” said long-time downtown art gallery owner Marty Walsh as she arrived for the festivities.

Thomas said the Pi Day pie potluck was “just an excuse to get together with friends in the park on a Saturday,” but it might become a tradition. “We like the idea of a holiday that’s not religious. There’s no presents. There’s no commercialization. No one needs a Pi Day card,” she said.

While the grownups chatted and ate, their children played with bubbles and Frisbees and balls of various kinds, all of them round. No footballs in this crowd.

Some of the kids — and a few of the adults — gave themselves temporary tattoos of the pi symbol.

But not everything goes on forever. The party at Circle Park was over by about 11 a.m., when those who were left packed up and headed home with leftover pie.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean.