17-2-09 At long last

Sziastok!

It has been a long time since I have posted, and I would like to let everyone know this is exactly because things are going very well and I have been busy. I hope that I will have more time to update on a regular basis when I am no longer working on REU applications all the time. It takes the gab right out of me (I know, right?)

Lots has happened. (Quiet, paperclip, it says what I want it to.) I have been over to Buda, and the trip across the river was lovely. This, of course, was on a day I elected not to bring my camera, so better luck next time.

I have been to Tesco, which is best described as others in my program have labelled it, the “Hungarian walmart with a soul” I think they are just being optimistic, as I see nothing guaranteeing that this megamart is different. It was certainly incongruous, compared with most of the small shops around here. (Fruit stores are abundant; grocery stores do not even have the same produce selection.) I cannot complain too much about the Tesco, though. It is the first place where I have found either tofu or peanut butter.

At the moment, I am in the computer lab of college international waiting for my Hungarian class to start. It is nice to have a place to wait, but the keyboard has different locations for many punctuation marks, so I keep typing sentences which have punctuation in the correct places, even if it is the wrong symbols. But look! £€ Good thing for my teachers that there is no way I will Tex here with the backslash on the wrong side, those look quite a bit like variables (more like sets, but anyway).

Wow, a spider that was just strolling across my wrist is very lucky I did not have more forceful reflexes. He must hear computer keys and mouse clicks all the time.

What was I saying? Classes have started, so I have more math facts to share and less time to share them. I am really enjoying all of my classes, and all of my professors, so far. And, I found a thermos, so I can at least bring coffee to school. This just goes to show I had indeed been in WA for too long.

Today I went to topology, which I may add to my schedule just to see numbers less than one this semester. Or this year. On the professor’s little (wait, what happened to the quotation mark?…) “introduce yourself” sheet, I left the mathematical interest spot blank. No reason to tell a professor right off that you don’t think you like his subject. Unless it is physics. So it goes.

I am getting the hang of the public transportation here, having only taken the tram the wrong way once in the last three days. This misadventure ended with me running into three other BSM participants who invited me to dinner. So it ended up that I had made a mistake in my favour. (heheh! Word just changed “favor to favour” Colour. Funny.

In Hungarian, I am learning how to count to twenty for a quiz in half an hour. It really gives you perspective on doing higher mathematics all the time when you have to learn to count. That, or I cannot escape numbers anywhere. Maybe both seem good.

Math fact of the day. Aut(J(5,2,0)=120 Where J(5,2,0) is a rather famous Johnson graph.