Math and Music

Today we awoke to find it had snowed during the night. This is a picture of the snow just outside the building we have class in.

We started off classes for the day with another Math lecture, learning more about base and congruence from yesterday. During lunch, a lot of us stayed back in the class room and worked on homework. Fei and Eric E got lunch at an interesting Japanese restaurant.

In the afternoon we had a lecture from Fazekas Gergely on Hungarian music. We moved through history from Bakeark Esterházy in the middle ages to Istvánffy and Liszt in the classical era to Kodály, Bartok and Ligeti in the modern era. The speaker also gave us advice on places to go to experience music while in the city. For example the Budapest Music Center, the Budapest Jazz club, the Liszt Museum, and many others.

That evening a group of seven of us went out to experience some of what we had learned during the talk first hand. We had dinner at the Soul Cafe and headed to the Budapest Palace of the arts to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The program contained Jean Sibelius's Lemminkäinen's Return, Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No 2 performed by Truls Mork and after an intermission, Prokofiev's sixth symphony.

It was a great concert and we all enjoyed it. As a cellist, my favorite piece was the cello concerto.

Coming up next is our first day with math both in the afternoon and morning. Saturday we visit the town of Szentendre.

Best Wishes,
Eric S. Eric E. Will and Zhifei