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07 September 2018 Photo Stephen Collett
Mathematician makes popular contribution to science Prof Atangana
Prof Atangana is the first African under 40 years of age to be selected as African Academic of Science affiliated in Mathematics. He recently delivered his inaugural lecture and is pictured with Eelco Lukas, Director of the Institute for GroundwaterStudies at the UFS (middle) and Prof Hendri Kroukamp, Acting Vice-Rector: Academic
Prof Abdon Atangana, researcher in the Institute for Groundwater Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS), recently delivered his inaugural lecture on the topic: Understanding God’s Nature with Non-Local Operators.

His research interests are methods and applications of partial and ordinary differential equations, fractional differential equations, perturbation methods, asymptotic methods, iterative methods, and groundwater modelling. Prof Atangana is the founder of the fractional calculus with non-local and non-singular kernels popular in applied mathematics today. He has introduced more than 12 mathematical operators, most of which bear his name (such as the Atangana-Baleanu fractional integral).

He stated: “We will not stop until we change the classical view of doing mathematics. Mathematics is not a subject but a tool given to mankind by God to understand nature. One single mathematical operator cannot portray God’s nature accurately. Therefore the Atangana Baleanu was suggested.”

New weapons

Most physical problems can be expressed in terms of mathematical formulations called differential equations. According to him the differential equation’s aim is to analyse, understand, and predict the future of a physical problem. Prof Atangana introduced the Atangana-Baleanu fractional integral. This brought new weapons into applied mathematics to model complex real-world problems more accurately.

Prof Atangana explained: “The Atangana-Baleanu fractional derivative is able to describe real-world problems with different scales, or problems that change their properties during time and space for instance, the spread of cancer, the flow of water within heterogeneous aquifers, movement of pollution within fractured aquifers, and many others. This crossover behaviour is observed in many empirical systems.”

Sudden change

The Atangana-Baleanu fractional derivative is also able to describe physical or biological phenomena, such as a heart attack, the physiological progression from life to death, structural failure in an aeroplane, and many other physical occurrences with sudden change with no steady state.

The new differential and integral operators are nowadays in fashion and are being applied with great success in many fields to model complex natural phenomena. It is believed that the future of modelling complex real-world problems relies on these non-local operators.

News Archive

The universal power of music and song to convey the unspeakable
2015-05-07

Philip Miller
Photo: Johan Roux

Spotlight photo: John Hodgkiss

Philip Miller, award-winning composer and sound artist, recently delivered the second instalment of the Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series on Trauma, Memory, and Representations of the Past on the Bloemfontein Campus. This lecture series forms part of a five-year research project led by Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. The series focuses on how the creative arts represent trauma and memory, and how these representations may facilitate the healing of historical wounds.

Disrupting the Silence: The Past and Transnational Memory
In Miller’s lecture, ‘Disrupting the Silence: The Past and Transnational Memory’, he discussed the creative process – and the far-researching effects – of his composition: ‘REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony’. The production consists of 4 soloists, an 80- to 100-member choir, a string octet, combined with gripping projected images and audio of victims testifying during the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) hearings.

While listening to those raw recordings, Miller would rewind continually and listen again. In between the sounds of the tape stretching and spooling, sighs, gulps for air, and moments when the speakers lost their speech, a hidden sound world revealed itself. And within these silences lay an entrenched trauma far more profound than the actual words spoken.

Communal remembering
When Miller asked Nomonde Calata how she felt about his using the recording of her heart-rending cry during her TRC testimony, her reply was poignant. For Calata, her cries – taken over by the voice of Sibongile Khumalo during the cantata – were a living memorial to her loving husband. “And it almost felt like a soothing balm to her traumatic loss,” Miller said.

“I believe that a collective body of people singing is a unique symbolic act of communal remembering. But more than that, it is a deep form of identification of our humanity, and allows for some form of catharsis for those testifiers who have attended the live performances. Just as a parent sings a lullaby to calm a crying child, the choir singing reaches those of us who continue to mourn.

“Music and song – and the arts in general – can convey the powerful stories of our nation without fearing to engage with the subject matter,” Miller said. “This I believe is the universal power of music and song: to convey a spiritual dimension to what perhaps is sometimes too graphic and painful to comprehend fully.”

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