Non-Mathy Fun!

I've spent a lot of time in class over the first two weeks of school, but there's still been a lot going on outside of class! Here are some non-academic highlights from the past couple of weeks.

Welcome Party
At the end of the first day of classes, there was a BSM welcome party! Lots of the professors and almost all of the students came. This was when I met a lot of the people who had arrived at the end of the last week. I also talked to a couple of professors. The most important thing I had to do was meet with Miklos Abert, the Inquiry Based Spectral Theory professor, and the other students interested in taking the course in order to schedule it. (Scheduling that class is a problem we're still working on...) I also ate a lot of what I think are sajtos pogácsa, a cheesy bread puff.

Supper at Hannah's
Vivienne, a student from Texas whom I met at the welcome party, and I had supper at Hannah's one night last week. Our plans for who would bring what food didn't end up working super well for various reasons, so we had to throw together supper from what Grace had. The final result was pasta with Hungarian white peppers (which are fantastic), peas, spinach, and "pesto" (olive oil and basil), along with some really good garlic bread. It turned out pretty well! Cooking and talking with Vivienne and Hannah for a few hours was a lot of fun!

Evensong
Last weekend the Anglican-Lutheran Society had a conference at Lake Balaton, so the night before the conference started, a Budapest Lutheran church and the Anglican church I've been attending hosted an Evensong service. I'd never been to Evensong before, and I really enjoyed the service. It was almost entirely sung, mostly by the Gabrieli Choir, which specializes in Anglican sacred music. There were a couple of hymns as well, and while I didn't know either one, they were both very singable. One was very fitting for an evening prayer service, and the other was about unity, which made sense in the context of the conference.

ARC
ARC (pronounced 'Arts') is a poster exhibition that is held by Budapest's large City Park for a couple of weeks each year. Each poster is the size of a billboard, and the messages tend to relate to social and political issues. The theme this year is, "What Do You Believe?" Here are some of the posters:

This poster, titled 'Among Friends,' puts Hungary in the middle of the Caspian. This was the poster that made me think the most, since I've spent time in Azerbaijan.

I went through ARC with a couple of other BSMers, and this was the group favorite. It says 'Respect Math!' The pie chart is a reference to Fidesz, the current ruling party in the National Assembly, winning 44.87% of the vote in the elections this year but getting 2/3 of the Assembly seats.

The picture is of Varosliget, or City Park. There's a controversial plan to clear out part of the park (the part with the 'Don't Save' button) and build new buildings for some museums that are currently in Buda.

This poster is a reference to the large emigration from Hungary and the fact that people leave even if they're overqualified for the jobs they get abroad.

N is a Number
Normally we would have colloquium on Thursday afternoons, but to start things off this week we watched N is a Number, a documentary about Paul Erdos, arguably the most prolific mathematician ever. We watched the movie in the Renyi Institute, which is Hungary's institute of mathematics under the Academy of Sciences. The building is gorgeous, and it has a really good library. I had seen N is a Number before, but it had been a few years, and it was so cool to recognize a lot of the names and places in the documentary.