Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - Famous Teachers
115 This kind of attention is particularly worthy in view of the fact that Sipos gained this recognition without having made any submissions to the Academy. Furthermore, between 1700 and 1854, he was the only mathematician whose dissertation was published by the Prussian Scientific Society without the author being a member of the Board. The thus internationally renown mathematician first worked as rector-professor in Szászváros (between 1798 and 1805) after having declined an invitation to Marosvásárhely (Tärgu Mures) to be the College’s instructor in philosophy. In 1805 he accepted the invitation issued by the College in Patak and became a full-time professor of mathematics and physics. During the course of his first year as professor, he suggested major reforms to transform the way mathematics was to be taught. Once his innovations were incorporated, the teaching of mathematics became more thorough and extended over longer periods of time, thus representing one of the most important changes in the curriculum in 1810. Although his changes influenced education for many years to come, he himself did not stay long at the College. Already in 1810, he resigned from his teaching position and opted for a more relaxed and financially more stable position as pastor of the congregation in Tordos on the banks of Maros River. Mathematics was not his sole interest. He had a great affinity for books and he was also known to be one of the best Kantian philosophers (next to Professor István Márton in Pápa) of his age and the most talented follower of Fichte in Hungary. He had also cultivated a close friendship with Kazinczy through correspondence and personal conversations during his stay in Patak. In Sárospatak, it was during Pál Sipos’ time that the teaching of the sciences was organized into pairs. István Nyiry taught mathematics and physics while Mózes Kézy (after Sipos’ departure) taught geometry and natural sciences. Kézy himself had been such an exceptional student that he was asked to stay as soon as he had completed his studies. At first, he had the responsibility of teaching rhetoric and poetics. Once Sipos left, he was entrusted with teaching the natural sciences, something which was coupled to three years of study in Göttingen, so he started teaching only in 1813. While in Germany he gained such expertise in the classic languages and literature that it gained him nationwide recognition. He was said to have been able to continue the appropriate quotation after any single word was cited from any of the books of Homer, Horatius or Vergillius. On the basis of the poetry he composed, he could get both Ferenc Kazinczy and Sándor Kövy, who disagreed in almost everything, to acknowledge his talent and brilliance. Kövy, the law professor deemed Kézy to be the most brilliant poet in Hungary, while Kazinczy, on his part, agreed to write the obituary for Kézy and submit it to the Scholarly Collections after he had fallen victim to the cholera epidemic in 1831. Following the death of Kézy, András Molnár took over Kézy’s duties in 1833, teaching mathematics and natural sciences. He had been a student in Patak, had taught in a secondary school in Rimaszombat for five years and had studied in Vienna and Berlin,. Pál Magda, of Lutheran denomination, was already a renown scientist when he moved to Patak. He was an expert in statistics and recognized to be the founder of statistics as this was transplanted into Hungarian. Magda was born in Rozsnyó into a middle-class family. He first arrived to the town on the banks of the Bodrog River when he was fifty-four after having had led a colorful life beforehand. He studied in Rozsnyó (Roznavská), Késmárk (Kezmarok), Pozsony
