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Date: 02/11/2004
Title: Mangena: Annual Congress of South African Mathematical Society


ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, MR MOSIBUDI MANGENA, TO THE ANNUAL CONGRESS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY, University of Potchefstroom

Director of Ceremonies,
President of the South African Mathematical Society, Professor Nigel Bishop,
Members of the South African Mathematical Society,
The Leadership and members of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences,
Ladies and Gentlemen

It is not necessary for me to play an advocacy role for mathematics with this audience before me. I will not attempt to convince you of how useful mathematics is to society and in the economy because you already know that. Rather, I would like to explore with you some of the social conditions that make excellence in mathematics possible.

Such conditions have existed from time to time over recorded human history. The Ancient Greek civilisation supported the conditions of reverence for knowledge, political patronage for scholars and development of a knowledge infrastructure in the form of libraries, particularly the library in Alexandria. This set of conditions admittedly fluctuated, but was maintained with some consistency over several centuries, long enough to see the likes of Pythagoras and Archimedes make their indelible marks, and for Euclid to produce the definitive text.

The anarchic Christians, who burned the library in Alexandria, and the warlike Romans, who succeeded the Greeks as masters of the ancient Western world, and had no interest in calculations beyond their applications in military logistics, all but put paid to our mathematical heritage. The Romans actually used a “dumbed down” and often-plain wrong version of Euclid for their somewhat limited purposes. Fortunately, the intellectual traditions of the Arab world and, somewhat later, the North African world came to the rescue, and both preserved and extended what the Greeks had developed.

From the perspective of Africa’s mathematical heritage, Timbuktu flourished as an independent scholarly town within the Songay Republic between about 1350 and 1650 A.D. There is abundant literary evidence of this golden period. Much of it is preserved in the Ahmed Baba Centre in Timbuktu. Although written in Arabic script, many manuscripts are in a non-Arabic African language. There is a tremendous amount of social and intellectual history in the manuscripts and they cover theology, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics.

In 2001, President Mbeki visited the Ahmed Centre. And as a result, the South African National Archives has become involved in assisting the Malian government and UNESCO in ensuring the preservation of the manuscripts. This project seems to present an opportunity also to the South African Mathematics Society and our astronomers to assist in popularising the intellectual history of our continent. We can use it also to affirm the values that constitute any successful intellectual culture.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is, I believe, an institution in the mould of the Timbuktu of the Middle Ages. It was conceptualised as a continental resource, and has a majority of students from Sub-Saharan Africa. This is happening during a time when it is all too easy to get away with calling something African, and then simply carrying on as usual. The Department of Science and Technology played a crucial role in the establishment and sustenance of AIMS, and we are very proud of what it has achieved.

The South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Applications (SACEMA), is linked to AIMS, and is another initiative of the Department of Science and Technology. SACEMA was set up to harness the expertise of the South African mathematics community in developing a quantitative understanding of the HIV and AIDS pandemic. But it obviously also has a role to play in other applications too, such as the periodic outbreaks of Foot and Mouth disease, which have the potential to devastate our national beef industry. From its establishment in 2003, SACEMA has been able to draw on the South African mathematical Diaspora very effectively. Professors Ekkehard Kopp from Hull University, Professor Wayne Getz from Seattle and Dr Brian Williams of the World Health Organisation are all South Africans who retain their links with their own institutions, but SACEMA would not be able to function without them. This is a smart way of living with the reality of globalised science.

The concept of proof is what distinguishes mathematics from other sciences. Mathematics, unlike the other sciences, is founded on deductive rather than inductive logic. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate this. A sociologist, an economist, a physicist and a mathematician are travelling together in a car through the Karoo. Alone on a hill they see a black sheep, sideways on, as they pass by. The sociologist says, “Amazing, sheep in the Karoo are black!” Retorts the economist, “Nonsense, you mean some sheep in the Karoo are black.” Says the physicist, “That is not precise enough; all we can say is that there is one sheep in the Karoo that is black.” The mathematician sighs wearily and says slowly, “There exists a hill in the Karoo on which there is at least one sheep, one half of which is black.”

The Nobel prize-winning physicist Dick Feynman, who shared a tearoom with mathematicians, had a longstanding bet that he would always be able to correctly use his intuition to determine whether any given mathematical conjecture was true or false without having to prove it. He claimed never to have lost this bet. However, whether the mathematicians agree has not been recorded.

Some historians claim that the crucial ingredient of proof was imported from the Greek legal system. The accused was proved guilty or not guilty. If true, this is a neat example of how real innovation happens at the boundaries between systems of knowledge. Another such example is the principle of conservation of matter that the accountant Antoine Lavoisier introduced into chemistry in the 18th century. He realised that the behaviour of matter during chemical reactions is governed by principles of bookkeeping, with the units this time being mass rather than currency.

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is an initiative of the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape, but is rapidly attracting interest in other regions. My Director-General launched CHPC last week and we are excited at the potential it offers for working across boundaries in the quantitative sciences. For the first time, in one meeting, computational cosmologists, particle physicists, chemists, climatologists, fluid flow specialists and bioinformatics scientists were brought together by a shared need to calculate. We cannot but support an initiative, which offers such great potential.

Throughout the history of mathematics there has been a healthy tension between the perspective that the best mathematics is done for its own sake, and the point of view that need and application, particularly in the realm of physics, is what drives mathematical innovation. After many years sometimes the most obscure theories (take non-Euclidean geometry, for example) achieve astonishingly practical applications. At other times (take the achievements of Alan Turing and his Operations Research team in Britain during World War Two), practical demand leads theory. Whichever personal bias each of us here today has, we are united in a love of mathematics and in the knowledge of its pride of place in the progress of humanity.

Colleagues, there is one thing we need to address before anything else. We need to increase the number of young people, particularly blacks and women, who are able to successfully complete the first course in Mathematics at our universities. The Department of Science and Technology has definite ideas on how to assist the Department of Education to achieve this goal. It depends not just on increasing matriculation pass rates in mathematics, but also in providing convincing information regarding careers in the quantitative sciences. I hereby invite the South African Mathematical Society to help us put effective strategies in place to deal with this critical problem.

May I, in closing, thank you for inviting me into your midst today. I truly feel at home.

Issued by: Ministry of Science and Technology
2 November 2004
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za)

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