Idiot tourist, part I

Eyal and Lauren had left early, so I took the train from Plzen to Prague with three of the Czechoslovakian mathematicians from the workshop, a journey of an hour and a half. I spent most of the train ride talking to one of them, Andrea, from Kosice in eastern Slovakia.

It was an interesting talk. She came from a small town of eleven thousand people near Kosice, which survives on a couple of factories (producing light switches and copper). Slovakia and the Czech Republic are much less urbanised than New Zealand, and have lots of such small towns. I'm sure at least part of the reason this works is that the countries are (geographically) small enough for people in small towns to be close to the big cities anyway. The reason that Andrea gave, though, was that Slovakians tend to get attached to the areas and houses in which they live; they rarely move house, and if they do it's often only to another town nearby. Even academics -- elsewhere notoriously unstable -- seem to follow this pattern: Andrea, for example, and then I realised that most of the other Czechs and Slovaks I'd met at the workshop had been at the same universities all their lives, and had answered when I'd asked that their hometowns were at or near the universities where they were now.

Andrea studied originally to be a mathematics teacher; a number of mathematicians start by training as teachers, and switch quite easily into research later on, which says a lot for the academic background of school maths teachers in Slovakia. She'd once run an after-school maths olympiad program at a local elementary school for bright eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Lots of similar classes are run by other people all over the country.

I was waiting in Prague railway station for Eyal and Lauren, thinking about all this and daydreaming about whether it would be possible to set up a similar program for junior high school students in New Zealand, when I realised that mysteriously my wallet was missing.