Today was a good day. My class taught me a new wrinkle on an old case. I love when that happens. Thanks, Flaviu! Then I reworked my own spreadsheet on another old case, and distributed it so that my students can show me where my mistakes are. Great classes teach their teachers.
Tomorrow at Oh-Dark-Thirty (5:55) I'm meeting two of my students for a weekend trip to the northeastern frontier of Romania, a region known as Moldavia. Even as the Balkan country which calls itself the Republic of Macedonia is not the Macedonia of Philip II and Alexander the Great (i.e., the northernmost province of Greece), so the country that calls itself Moldova is not that part of Romania called Moldavia, though in both cases, the peoples of the similarly-named areas no doubt share some cultural and ancestral ties. The territory of Moldavia, however, is one of the three major regions of Romania, first united with Transylvania and Wallachia in 1600 by the Wallachian Prince Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave). Mihai, whose statue and name bless my Romanian home square, was assassinated six months later by order of an Austrian general whom he had considered his ally, and the Romanian union he had founded immediately disintegrated. Yet, to this day Mihai is a hero of Romanian history, and his (frescoed) image was featured in the Ortodox cathedral in Alba Julia, as well as in my square in Cluj.
So, off we go on another weekend trek. I promise this time not to lose my computer.
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