Loyiso nongxa biography of william
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How being colourblind turned Prof Loyiso Nongxa into a mathematician
Being colourblind put a stop to Prof Loyiso Nongxa’s youthful aspirations of becoming a chemist or a doctor. Because of his eye defect, he really struggled with some of the basic experimentation and laboratory work required during his undergraduate studies. He then turned his attention to the symbolic black-and-whiteness of mathematics. A loss to the chemistry world, however, turned out to be a win for mathematics and South African academia.
Nongxa would go on to receive his PhD in mathematics, establish the Centre for Mathematical and Computational Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, and serve a whole decade long as the institution’s vice-chancellor. Last year, he retired as professor and chairperson of the National Research Foundation.
He was the one that his fellow pupils at Healdtown College near Fort Beaufort turned to him to run them through their science subjects. Sometimes he even had to set the tests that they all had to write. Nongxa, from Indwe in the Eastern Cape, matriculated in 1972 as top matriculant in South Africa.
Premedical studies at the University of Fort Hare followed, but by his third year Nongxa realised he needed a change of plan.
“I had a holiday job at an analyt
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In South Africa, ‘Decolonizing’ Mathematics
Twice a week, Tiri Chinyoka holds extracurricular classes for mathematics undergraduates at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. One October evening, a predominantly black group of first-year students gathered around whiteboards as they grappled with the intricacies of vectors and matrices, while on the wall behind them some oppressive history looked on: a mural spanning some 30 feet portraying students past, dressed in black gowns and mortarboards — all of them white.
“Structurally, nothing has changed from the colonial era, whether you’re talking about human experience or you’re talking about the physical infrastructure,” says Chinyoka, sitting later in his office in one of the university’s classically inspired buildings that overlook the city. Sporting a black leather flat cap and dreadlocks, Chinyoka is not a stereotypical mathematician. “If you look at what we teach in the mathematics curriculum, it is almost irrelevant to the South African context,” he says.
Since apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa’s universities have struggled to transform themselves, leading to escalating student protests over the last three years — including the toppling of a prominent statue of Cecil Rhodes, an infamous colonize