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18 April 2019 | Story Rulanzen Martin
The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice IRSJ) has initiated a Social Justice Week at the University of the Free State (UFS), which started on Friday 12 April  until Wednesday 17 April 2019. 

Ten key events took place during the week. It ranged from dialogues, workshops, talk shows, debates, and interactive displays and events on issues of multilingualism and diversity, social innovation, engaged scholarship, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, gender sensitisation, sexual consent, sexual preparedness, universal access, disability, anti-discrimination, and security.

There was also a round-table discussion on 17 April 2019 with various UFS stakeholders on off-campus student security as well as an inter-institutional discussion on the same topic. The UFS Debating Society will take on the topic of the UFS Language Policy, while Olga Barends from the Free State Centre for Human Rights will host a dialogue on sexual consent.

The IRSJ has also designed and implemented SOJO-VATION: Social Innovation/ Social Change, which strives to create a foundational platform where ideas of social justice, innovation, and engaged scholarship at the UFS and in society can be hosted. SOJO-VATION partners with the Office for Student Leadership, Development, and Community Engagement.

The collaborating partners for the Social Justice Week includes various UFS stakeholders such as the Sasol library, the Gender and Sexual Equity Office, UFS Protection Services, the Free State Centre for Human Rights, the Student Representative Council (SRC), the Office for Student Leadership Development, Kovsie Innovation, GALA, the FFree State Centre for Human Rights, SRC Associations, the Office for Student Governance, Kovsie Innovate, Start-Up-Grind, EVC, EBL, Community Engagement, the Institutional Transformation Plan (ITP) Dialogues Office, Residence Dialogues, UFS Debating Society, Debate Afrika!, the Center for Universal Access and Disability Support (CUADS), and the Gateway Office. 

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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