The South African Mathematics Olympiad

The South African Mathematics Olympiad is an annual mathematics competition for high-school students in South Africa. The competition is organised by the South African Mathematics Foundation, and comprises three rounds which increase in difficulty. The final round of the 2019 South African Mathematics Olympiad will take place on Thursday, 25 July, and the top ten junior (Grade 8 and 9) and senior (Grades 10—12) competitors will be invited to a prize-giving evening taking place on 14 September 2019. At the same time, the problem selection committee will meet to start setting the 2020 papers.

According to the SAMF, nearly 100000 students participated in the 2017 edition of the competition. The numbers for the 2019 competition are likely to be similar. These students all write the first round of the competition, which learners write at their individual schools in March every year. The papers are marked at the school, and any student with more than 50% is invited to participate in the second round of the competition.…

By | July 11th, 2019|Competition, English, Event, News|8 Comments

Mathemafrica and the Next Einstein Forum (NEF) #1

Dear Mathemafrica readers,

I am sitting at the AIMS-Senegal institute in Mbour (about 1.5 hours drive South of Dakar) and together with my team member Sebastian and the AIMS-Senegal staff and students, we are preparing an interactive mathematics exhibition (as part of the IMAGINARY – open mathematics project).. It will be shown as of March 8 at the Next Einstein Forum (NEF), to be held at a huge conference venue just outside Dakar.

There will be many ministers, scientists, politicians, even presidents from (apparently all fifty-four) African countries – and also many international guests – joining the NEF, with the goal to discuss about scientific innovations, collaborations and solutions in Africa!

We have to plan to blog live from the NEF, with insights and views from participants. And of course, we will let you know about our exhibition, about a new competition, we will launch and everything happening around!

Prepare yourself for the NEF at:

gg2016.nef.org/

iameinstein.org

www.facebook.com/NextEinsteinForum

And the Twitter hashtag: #AFRICASEINSTEINS

Please find a picture from our first technical setup yesterday at the AIMS Institute.…

By | March 6th, 2016|English, Event, News, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta day 0

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics.

The zeroth day (before things really kick off with the talks) was both exciting and frustrating, with a group of lecturers and researchers from all corners of the Southern hemisphere, many of whom already knew each other from previous meetings. It seems to be an extremely friendly group, and drinks and snack flowed after registration opened yesterday evening.

The frustration came about because I was rather hoping that on speaking with people it would make choosing which talks to go to easier, but sadly everyone I spoke with seemed to be doing work that they were passionate about, and that was relevant to my own interest in mathematics education. I sit here on day 1 before the talks start none the wiser as to which talks to attend over the coming days, but pretty sure that it’s going to be an incredibly stimulating week.…

By | November 23rd, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Event|0 Comments

The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Edit: I had a great deal of help for the poster from Andreas Matt, Antonia Mey and Adam Weston.

Tomorrow I will head to Port Elizabeth to the Elephant Delta 2015 conference: The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics – quite a mouthful of a title! It looks like it’s going to be an incredibly full week with a huge amount of new information, new people and new ideas. I am going to attempt to blog as much as I can from the conference. The program is spectacularly full with parallel sessions running through the day. The program can be found here.

I am already having a tough time deciding which talks to attend, so if you have a look at the program and see something that you would really like me to write about, then please leave a comment and I will do my best to get there and write up what I learn.…

AIMS-Senegal – picture story of a maths communication adventure

Dear all,

this is a picture story, so be prepared to see many pictures! And it is an adventure too, since we (I will explain later who is “we”) tried something quite new: an interactive highly technical mathematical exhibition in Senegal, including a road show with high school students and Master maths students, talks, conferences, workshops and discussions, and games! And: all in three days!

Let’s start:

Day 0:

The day before the opening of the exhibition and the start of the roadshow. And my first day in Senegal. I arrive around 1:30 am in the morning and spend the night in Dakar. At 11:00 I am picked up by a car from AIMS-Senegal, who is organising the event together with the Next Einstein Initiative and IMAGINARY. In the car, I meet two other international participants: Niane Kode from Senegal, who works at AIMS-Cameroon, and Marcos Cherinda from Mocambique, an ethno-matematician, who also attended the AIMS-IMAGINARY workshop in 2014.…

By | November 16th, 2015|English, Event, Level: Simple, Uncategorized|6 Comments

Attracting women and girls to careers in physics – video seminar on the 6th of August

Attracting women and girls to careers in physics

This seminar may be attended via video conference in Pretoria, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal. Details are indicated below.

The HSRC Seminar Series In collaboration with the Africa Institute of South Africa

Speaker: Dr Malebo Tibane, Department of Physics, Unisa,

Discussant: Dr Palesa Sekhejane, HSRC

Chair: Prof. Narnia Bohler-Muller, HSRC

Venues in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town (Videoconferencing facilities: see below)

Date: 6 August 2015

Time: 12h30 – 14H00

Representation of girls and women in the Physics related sector is declining or stagnating globally and locally. Therefore, issues that hamper on the development of women to participate equally in male-dominated spheres need to be discussed and captured adequately to create an enabling environment for women and girls in the sciences, and physics in general. In November 2005 Women in Physics in South Africa (WiPiSA) was launched, with funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and under the auspices of the South African Institute of Physics.…

By | July 19th, 2015|Advertising, Conference advert, English, Event, News|0 Comments

AIMS-IMAGINARY Workshop 2014

A little blog about the conference in which Mathemafrica was conceived! This first appeared on the ICTP math blog on the 18th of November 2014.

 

One of the perks of working in mathematics is that I get to travel the world as part of my job. This time it was Cape Town, South Africa; I flew down there to participate in a workshop on maths `outreach’ activities in Africa. The workshop was held at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) and was organised in partnership with IMAGINARY. Will introduce the organisers in a bit but let me focus on the idea of mathematics outreach for now.

For me, mathematics outreach is an attempt to share mathematical ideas with non-experts in the field. The term non-expert includes a broad spectrum of people stretching from school children to senior citizens. Math-outreach is usually done through exhibitions and the written media but the definition allows for many more forms of communication.…

By | March 15th, 2015|English, Event|1 Comment

Mathematics Communication in Africa

A workshop-exhibition to understand and plan maths communication and maths outreach activities in Africa, organized by the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences – Next Einstein Initiative (AIMSNEI), IMAGINARY and the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. The workshop and exhibition will be hosted at AIMS-South Africa, in Muizenberg, Cape town.

How clear is this post?
By | November 7th, 2014|Event|2 Comments