September 1, 2003
After traveling around the United States visiting numerous family, friends, and graduate schools, on January 19th I flew to Prague and then took the train to Budapest, Hungary.
Budapest is a compact city of 2 million people. It is the cultural, political, and economic center of Hungary. Budapest has a sort of cheerful, 19-century, ornate feel to it. The Danube river divides the hilly western half (called Buda) from the flat eastern half (called Pest). Buda and Pest united to become Budapest in the 1800s. The Danube was the border of the Roman empire. In Buda there is an old Roman amphitheater.
When I arrived in Budapest I took a two-week crash course in "survival Hungarian". Then I began my spring semester studying in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (BSM) program.
Hungary is a wonderful country, and the BSM program is fabulous.
The BSM program gives American undergraduate students the opportunity to spend a semester or two studying mathematics in English under Hungarian professors at a relatively low cost. Hungary has a strong educational system, especially in math. Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, writes, "The Hungarian educational system has been the most successful in pure mathematics." I think that we could benefit by studying their educational system and trying to understand why it works so well. One thing they emphasize is problem-solving.
As a side note, the Soviet Union was also very strong in mathematics, especially in applied math. There is a program called "Math in Moscow", which I was also interested in but never ended up doing. I know someone who did both programs and liked them both.
It seems like nearly a third of the mathematics graduate students here at Madison have studied in the Budapest program.
In the BSM program, students are allowed to take as many courses as they can fit into their schedule. I tried out about 13 classes, then dropped down to 9, and eventually settled on 6 -- Geometry, Topology, Graph Theory, Elementary Number Theory, Complex Analysis, and basic Hungarian.
Graph Theory, Combinatorics, and Elementary Number Theory are Hungarian specialties. These are areas of math where there are many difficult problems, but which do not require much background to start working in. Even a high school student can prove important theorems in these areas.
Now that I know how to recognize a Hungarian name, I am impressed by how many mathematicians have Hungarian names. When I was studying Graph Theory, it seemed like the majority of the "big names" in Graph Theory were Hungarian. That is pretty amazing for a country of 10 million people.
The professors taught me how to think and speak the (English) language of mathematics. They were very logical and well-organized.
I was very impressed with Hungarian society. Everywhere I go, I look for models of how to build a good society. Hungary is one of my models.
Hungarians have taken very good care of God's creation. Even though the government changed very much in the last century, people always agreed that they should take care of the green spaces around their city.
The village where I lived was very beautiful. It was surrounded by pristine hills. The edge of the village was very well-defined. Beyond there were green spaces. I would go on walks on Saturdays. I saw families going on walks in the woods, people paragliding along the ridges, shepherds herding flocks of sheep, bicyclists, and motorbikes.
The Hungarian public transportation system is not the fanciest in Europe, but it was my favorite. It was simple, functional, and seemed to make the most efficient use of money and resources. Every day I rode the tram and the metro between my village in the hills of Buda and the school in Pest. It was an hour each way. Every day I saw thousands of people. Commuters, children going to and from school, groups of children being lead by adults, and homeless people. Public transportation brings you in contact with many different people in the society, not just people in your same social group. Here in the United States I mostly see people who belong to the same "networks" and social groups to which I belong. Our vehicles and building patterns have allowed us to construct a way of living that insulates us from people outside our circle. This makes us a more partitioned society.
I was very impressed with how well-behaved the Hungarians were. They struck me as a serious, orderly, quiet, and gentle people. It is hard for me to think of a time when I saw a Hungarian being antisocial, aggressive, strident, pushy, or obnoxious.
I think that family life is a fundamental indicator of the well-being of a society. The relationship between parents and children in Hungary seemed to be very good. Children were well-behaved. I tried to get a couple Hungarians to explain their secret to me. They mentioned two important factors. First, Hungarians love and value children. Second, television and the internet have not yet permeated Hungarian society to the point that children spend a large portion of their time with these communication technologies.
Parents in Hungary seemed to treat children very reasonably. When I saw parents correct their children, they did it in a persistent, gentle, almost soothing way. They almost never seemed to have to physically restrain their children. The extremely rare exceptions proved the rule. Like the one time I saw a mother grab her son out of frustration, or the time I saw a a father touching his teen-age daughter more than she liked, and I thought, "That's something I never see here -- a parent provoking a child."
It is distressing to me that children in America tend to be neglected and are often regarded as in the way. For example, when I got on the plane to come home, the boy in the seat behind me started to read a book to his mother. She said, "Read to yourself. I want to read my book." We have a tendency to place a higher value on individual fulfillment and career success than on children.
I visited a total of 13 countries while I was in Europe.
During spring break I visited the beautiful, mountainous peninsula of Southwest Europe called the "Balkans". Greece is the tip of this peninsula. I took the train through Serbia and Macedonia to Greece. I visited Thessaloniki, Athens, Delphi, Larisa, and Meteora. I visited many ancient churches in Thessaloniki, mostly built in the 400s, but one of them was built in the 200s. They are still in use. In Athens I visited the Acropolis, and stood on the little outcropping of rock called "Mars Hill", which overlooks the ancient marketplace (known as the Agora). The apostle Paul stood on Mars Hill when he gave his speech, "To an Unknown God," in Acts 17. Delphi is the ancient religious site where the Greeks consulted the Delphic oracle. It is an area of stunning natural beauty. There are tens of thousands of inscriptions on the stones which use the same (capital) Greek characters that we use today. They are very legible. The ancient Greeks believed that a slave must always remain a slave. But they also believed that if a person became a slave of a god, he could never become the slave of a person again. So when a master wanted to free his slave, he would go to the temple and have an inscription carved into the wall of the temple dedicating his slave to the god. Then the slave was free forever, because he was the slave of a god. Delphi was rediscovered when an archaeologist noticed a wall on which thousands of these "freedom inscriptions" were carved. I thought that Meteora was even more stunning than Delphi. There are many rocks with steep, vertical sides, sticking hundreds of feet in the air. In the early part of the 11th century monks began to build monasteries on top of the rocks. Only six of them are still used today. Steps have been made to allow visitors to enter some of these monesteries. On my way back to Hungary I took the train through Bulgaria and Romania.
I finished the semester on May 31, and then traveled in a circle around central and southeast Europe until July 8th when I flew back to the United States. I visited Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and Turkey.
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