WINDHOEK
Mathematics is a very ubiquitous discipline because of its unique characteristics of being a very rigorous discipline, a means for probing the intricacies of science disciplines and for storing information acquired in other disciplines.
Disciplines that have actively and increasingly deployed the advances of mathematics have been mainly physics, engineering, biology (population dynamics and epidemiology), of late economics (mathematical economics, micro-economics) and political science.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity is a physicist’s interpretation of the Lorentz Group and his general theory of relativity is a section in differential geometry.
In 1979 the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three physicists for unifying electro-magnetism and weak interaction (the so-called Weinberg-Glashow-Salam Theory) and the tool that enabled them to fuse these seemingly unrelated fundamental forces is group theory.
In the last few couple of years starting from 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005 and this year the Nobel Prizes in economics were awarded for the application of game theory, a branch of statistics that studies multi-person decision-making scenarios, to economics.
In particular, this year’s Nobel Prize went to three economists-cum- applied mathematicians for their work on mechanism design theory, a theory which is used in working out solutions to multi-agent problems under asymmetric information.
The approach centres on how to provide incentives to agents who have private information to reveal their truthful preferences so that the solution worked out can be stable, i.e. so that no economic agent can be tempted to violate the agreed upon solution or arrangement/settlement.
The recently held Southern Africa Mathematical Sciences Association (SAMSA) conference was a big honour for Namibia as not many conferences of such nature are held in our country. It attracted participants from universities in Southern Africa, East Africa, West Africa as well as Europe.
A total of 50 presentations were made in various fields of mathematics. As far as we know or can remember this was one of the few conferences to be held in Namibia where cutting-edge ideas in one of the most difficult disciplines of human knowledge were discussed with the first one being the conference on Fundamental and Applied Aspects of Modern Physics which was held in Lǟ