The roots of "Western European societal evolution". A concept of Europe by Jenő Szűcs

Jenő Szűcs wrote his essay entitled Sketch on the three regions of Europe in the early 1980s in Hungary. During these years, a historically well-argued opinion emphasising a substantial difference between Central European and Eastern European societies was warmly received in various circles of the political opposition. In a wider European perspective Szűcs used the old “liberty topos” which claims that the history of Europe is no other than the fulfillment of liberty. In his Sketch, Szűcs does not only concentrate on questions concerning the Middle Ages in Western Europe. Yet it is this stream of thought which brought a new perspective to explaining European history. His picture of the Middle Ages represents well that there is a way to integrate all typical Western motifs of post-war self-definition into a single theory. Mainly, the “liberty motif”, as a sign of “Europeanism” – in the interpretation of Bibó’s concept, Anglo-saxon Marxists and Weber’s social theory –, developed from medieval concepts of state and society and from an analysis of economic and social structures. Szűcs’s historical aspect was a typical intellectual product of the 1980s: this was the time when a few Central European historians started to outline non-Marxist aspects of social theory and categories of modernisation theories, but concealing them with Marxist terminology

Equipartitioning by a convex 3-fan

We show that for a given planar convex set K of positive area there exist three pairwise internally disjoint convex sets whose union is K such that they have equal area and equal perimeter

Phase transition in nanomagnetite

Recently, the application of nanosized magnetite particles became an area of growing interest for their potential practical applications. Nanosized magnetite samples of 36 and 9 nm sizes were synthesized. Special care was taken on the right stoichiometry of the magnetite particles. Mössbauer spectroscopy measurements were made in 4.2–300 K temperature range. The temperature dependence of the intensities of the spectral components indicated size dependent transition taking place in a broad temperature range. For nanosized samples, the hyperfine interaction values and their relative intensities changed above the Verwey transition temperature value of bulk megnetite. The continuous transition indicated the formation of dendritelike granular assemblies formed during the preparation of the samples

The Complex Hydrogeological Study of a Transboundary Aquifer Between Hungary and Romania.

In the framework of a NATO Science for Peace project involving three scientific partners, complex hydrogeological investigation and groundwater modeling of a regional transboundary aquifer between Hungary and Romania were carried out between 2000 and 2004. In order to achieve the sustainable water management of the investigated internationally shared aquifer, the main tasks of the international project were: − Development of a common data-base, − Additional field measurements, − Common interpretation of the geological and hydrogeological settings, − Creating the conceptual flow model of the transboundary aquifer, − Regional and local scale groundwater modeling using the MODFLOW, − Model simulation of different scenarios for water management purposes, − Transport modeling on local scales in order to solve contamination problems, − Review of the main results obtained from the transboundary approach in the view of the European Water Framework Directive