John Calvin was quite influential in Hungary, and the Reformed church is still large here, especially in the eastern half of the country. I grew up in a Reformed church in the States. While the Reformed Church of America and the Reformed Church of Hungary are not officially connected, I think they share a lot theologically.

Tim and I are students at Calvin College. We studied in Budapest through a math program associated with St. Olaf College, but about twenty other Calvin students studied in Budapest this semester through a Calvin program. We didn't see those students very often, but they had us over for dinner at their dorms a couple of Sunday nights, and Prof. Berglund had us all over to his apartment a couple of times too. Also, one Tuesday night, I randomly found a few Calvin students at the Astoria metro stop and went out with them. Oh, and one Sunday that I went to a church with a friend from my math program, I ended up sitting next to a couple of Calvin students during the service.

Larry and Katie Winckles, missionaries in Budapest, are the parents of a friend who graduated from Calvin last spring. They took Tim and I out for coffee one Saturday morning and then showed us around Kálvin tér and Ráday street. Kálvin tér and my school are both named after John Calvin. There used to be a statue of John Calvin at Kálvin tér, but it was moved because of construction on Metro 4. The Winckles showed us where it stands now in the courtyard of a building of the Károli Gáspár Reformed University. Here is a picture of it from yesterday. (Hopefully the snow from the weekend will last until Christmas.)

Another weekend, Tim and I went to the Winckles' church, where the songs were in Hungarian and the message was translated one sentence at a time. Afterwards, they showed us the large downtown Christmas market. Larry Winckles has published a nice coffee table book about Budapest. I bought a copy, but you can preview the entire book, Glimpses of Budapest, online.

Today is Christmas Eve, the day that Hungarians open their Christmas gifts and eat delicious fish soup. I was fortunate enough to participate in both traditions!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Boldog Karácsonyt mindenkinek!

The semester is done. Yesterday, most of the BSM students and professors got together for a farewell party. Most students are leaving in the next few days. Tim, my friend and roommate, just flew out of Budapest earlier today. I still have another week in Budapest. I will miss my host family and the city when I leave, but it will be good to be home again.

As a tribute to the semester, I have collected some quotes mostly from my class notebooks. Some of them are funny out of context. Some are even funnier if you remember the context. If you were in my any of my classes, maybe you will remember some. Most of them though are not funny but still worth saving.

"Note: Every step can be justified by epsilon-delta stuff."

"Some people have car stereos." (After class was disrupted by loud music.)

"Even if someone was stealing the car, nobody would care!" (After class was disrupted by a loud car alarm.)

"Rabbits never die."

"Derangement = completely wrong arrangement."

"Put numbers into holes according to their odd parts." (Part of an application of the Pigeon Hole Principle.)

"A tree is a connected graph that contains no cycles, and a forest is a graph whose components are trees."

"It's the same argument as before - you just have to write more."

"Rice fields have to be flooded after they are planted." (The beginning of a proof of Euler's Formula.)

"One, two, or many."

"Glue some random person to the bride."

"The world of the last four digits"

"One may eat the biscuit as a step of the game."

"I don't care if I win, I just want to eat the biscuit."

"Every triangle is equilateral... We can go home now." (Of course, this is not true, but the error in the proof was not obvious.)

"Ah ha! Feeling of success!"

"Grundy had an idea."

"Like Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, this is a good weapon."

"the Pope said 'Go tell your sins to the piano.'"

"Oh, that! That's no rope! That's my guts!"

"Life is not a whipped cream cake."

"The suspicious things are those that are not suspicious."

"The international situation is intensifying."

"Nem tudja a bálna, milyen jó a málna."

"Legyen a feleségem, Eva."

"A macskám olyan husos, mint egy zsák krumpli."

"Hol volt, hol nem volt..."

"Volt egy török, Mehemed, Sose látott tehenet."

"Sziasztok hogyhogy."

"I don't even know what the formal difference between cats and dogs is." Response: "I formalized it earlier this morning."

"Okay, we will meet at the Princess at Deák tér." Response: "Who is she?"

"What if I forget about i? ... I never forget about myself!"

"In every class, I will lie at least twice."

"Like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive... I don't care."

"Distinguish a prime from a polynomial."

"Every group is finite."

"The most important things are polynomials."

"Number Theory is far better than Galois Theory."

"The high school dream: (x + y)^p = x^p + y^p."

"Do you read books?" (Before defining a dictionary for monomials.)

"There exist hundreds of proofs, but it's still a bit mysterious."

"The probability that a tree is seen from the middle of the forrest is 6/pi^2."

"One can make this precise, but that's not our job."

"Since any natural number is either good or bad..."

"This is related to the Riemann hypothesis, which is equivalent to a slight improvement on the error term on one estimation."

"I have never seen [Fermat's Last Theorem] correctly stated in a newspaper."

"Sometimes it is easier to prove a stronger statement in mathematics -- you have a stronger induction hypothesis."

"Hint: Part C has nothing to do with parts A and B."

"Two Diophantine equations can look similar while one is trivial and the other is a famous problem in mathematics."

"Jó munkát!"

"By the method of infinite descent, we are done."

**Amazing Grace played on an ocarina**

"Jó munkát!"

I use Budapest Public Transportation almost every day here. To get to school, I usually ride the metro, transferring from the blue line to the red line. Below is a picture of a mostly empty blue-line metro car. Sometimes the metro is so full that I have to stand during the entire trip, but other times I get to sit and read while I travel.

The yellow metro line, completed in 1896, is the third oldest underground line in the world. It is slower than the other two lines in Budapest, but it has nice tunes. Take a listen:

If you want to see more of Budapest's metro, watch the movie Kontroll. Even if you don't care about the metro, I would still recommend the movie.

Tim and I have discovered that taking buses and trams can get us to school faster than the metro at certain times of the day. This is a picture of the 30 bus which goes from very close to our house to the Eastern Railway Station.

The Eastern Railway Station is also where we get off of the red-line metro while going to school. School is only a six minute walk from there. (The Eastern Railway Station is also a good place to catch a train to another city!)

Right now there is a lot of construction around this train station. Metro 4, the green line, is on its way.

And, here is a picture of a tram that I have never ridden.

But pictures a can only tell so much. Here is a video of the walk through Újpest that Tim and I frequently make from our house to the closest metro station. The walk takes about ten minutes, but I didn't want to bore you, so I sped the video up by eight times.

Warning: The video is very shaky. I tried to hold the camera still, but that is hard while walking. Also, speeding the video up made the shaking worse. Now I know the importance of camera stabilizers.

I took this video a few weeks ago on a foggy chilly Friday around 9:30 in the morning. If I somehow get a camera stabilizer before I leave, I will film the walk again. Then you could see the Christmas decorations in Újpest.

Yesterday, I took the Putnam math competition. Since we had to take it at the same time as everybody in the States, the test did not finish until midnight. Since the metro stops running before then, I had planned on taking a night bus afterwards. Instead, some friends let me sleep at their apartment.

Szia.