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15 June 2018 Photo Supplied
Kovsies dominate SA students athletics team
Marné Mentz is one of six Kovsie female athletes in the South African student team to the CUCSA Games.

Students of the University of the Free State (UFS) are well represented on the South African student teams for this year’s CUCSA Games.

The competition that takes places biennially is staged from 18 to 22 June 2018 in Gaborone, Botswana.

The Confederation of University and Colleges Sports Associations (CUCSA) comprises of the Africa Zone VI countries with its members being Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, who will all be a part of the action. 

The South African men’s and women’s teams will compete in athletics, basketball, soccer, table tennis and volleyball.

After UFS female athletes won the women’s competition at the University Sport South Africa (USSA) championships in April, it came as no surprise that they had produced the most athletes, with six out of the 17, in the national women’s athletics team. 

The athletes chosen are: Ané Erasmus (hurdles), Lynique Beneke (long jump), Marné Mentz, Tsepang Sello, Lara Orrock and Tyler Beling (all middle distances). Emmarie Fouché from KovsieSport will be one of the four athletics coaches at the games. Tsebo Matsoso (sprints), Ruan Jonck and Pakiso Mthembu (both middle distances) will form part of the men’s team.

Kovsies’ Gauta Mokati will captain the men’s football team. Jeranimo Power had initially been selected to play, but had to withdraw due to injury. Thabo Lesibe is another UFS player selected for the men’s team and Godfrey Tenoff of KovsieSport will serve as the assistant coach. Noxolo Magudu will represent Kovsies in the women’s football team.

Although there aren’t any UFS players in the CUCSA basketball teams, the men’s team will be managed by Clement Kock, an assistant coach for the Kovsies basketball team.

News Archive

Stochastic Modelling for Reliability from Russia
2013-12-20

 

 Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s
The Russian professor first visited our university in 1993 and loved the environment. For the last 15 years we were fortunate to have had a man of Prof Maxim (MS) Finkelstein’s (65) stature as part of our Department of Mathematical Statistics.

“I like the atmosphere, the environment and the people of the UFS,” says Prof Finkelstein. “The UFS is a real campus, not part of the city as a lot of other universities in South Africa.”

Prof Finkelstein completed his MSc in Mathematical Physics from the Leningrad State University in the USSR in 1971. Maths and Physics have been a passion of his since a young age. In 1979, Prof Finkelstein completed his PhD in Mathematical Theory of Reliability at Leningrad Elektropribor Institute. Before his career at our university, Prof Finkelstein was a Senior Researcher at St. Petersburg Elektropribor Institute and an Associate Professor at Leningrad Technological Institute.

His long list of publications includes over 170 papers and five books. His monograph Failure Rate Modelling for Reliability and Risk was published by Springer in 2008. More recently another monograph – which was co-authored with JH Cha – was published by Springer in April 2013 and is called Stochastic Modelling for Reliability: Shocks, Burn-in, and Heterogeneous Populations.

Prof Finkelstein’s research interests include mathematical theory of reliability, survival analysis, risk and safety modelling, stochastic processes and stochastics in demography. When asked about leisure and life outside of research, the devoted academic’s response was as follows…

“To have publications, you have to work all the time. I work half of Saturdays and most of Sundays,” Prof Finkelstein says. “I spend three months a year in Russia and Germany – mostly during the European summer – for my research.”
“But apart from that, I like reading – classical Russian authors mostly. I swim in the UFS’s swimming pool almost every day and I play tennis as well.”

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