Sometimes I don't recognize a story until
several years after it started. Here is a pleasant surprise.
I was first introduced to the elegance of bridge construction during
my time at the University of Patras. In 1997, I took 6 months off from my
faculty position at Duke and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University
of Patras, Greece. I acquired several graduate students (Romanian) in
the Medical Physics Department and so each year, I returned to Patras to
have a bit of serious work with my "Romanian student mafia" and a bit
of serious play - camping at various places along the Ionian Sea.
This is the view of the Ionian Sea from my office window at the
University of Patras (July 31, 2001). You can see a ferry in the
foreground that takes cars, trucks, busses and people between Rio
and Antirion. For the Olympics, a bridge was built to manage the increasing
traffic between Rio and Antirio (meaning in Greek, Before Rio).
Consequently, these ferries became a thing of the past and a new cable
stay bridge was under construction. Imagine my surprise, some of the
Freyssinet guys (Bruno, for one) also worked on the Rio-Antirion Bridge.
The following year, I participated in a conference (Nonlinear Dynamics)
at the University of Patras (Tassos Bountis organizes these yearly events).
Here are a few images of the early pylon construction a year later (August
2002).
Here is a photo of the opening of this bridge from Ovidiu, one of my
Romanian colleagues at the University of Patras.