SciFest Africa’s lectures are about as far removed from the archetypal image of huge-brained geeks as it’s possible to get, representing diverse and extremely interesting science-based subject matter, for boffins and non-boffins alike.
Like their subject matter, the lecturers are equally fascinating. Take Dr Arthur Benjamin, for example. For this renowned American ‘mathemagician”, his visit to SciFest Africa 2010 as a guest lecturer represents a double whammy: not only will it be his first visit to the annual South African science festival, but also his first visit to Africa.
Benjamin is a professor of mathematics at the Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and is legendary for his ability to multiply numbers faster than a calculator and figure out the day of the week for any date in history. He’s also keen to inspire others to tap into their own ‘smartness”.
‘I’m hoping that people will look at maths and numbers a little differently after my presentation at SciFest,” he says. ‘My goal is not for people to see how smart I am, but how smart they can be.”
Benjamin says that when he was a child he enjoyed seeing how many different ways there were to solve a problem.
‘I was amazed that you would always get the same answer,” he said. ‘I found that consistency of arithmetic to be absolutely beautiful and I still do today.”
According to the mathemagician, his family was very theatrical and he used to perform at children’s parties when he was a teenager.
‘I learned magic through books and by purchasing equipment at a local magic shop. When I started doing shows for older audiences, I mixed in some of my mathematical skills and that got all kinds of attention.”
You can catch Benjamin at 7pm at the Guy Butler Theatre on the lower ground floor of the 1820 Settlers Monument on March 24 and in the Monument Ground Floor Art Gallery at 2pm on March 25 and 4pm on March 26.
From numeric genius to nutritional ecologist — South Africa-born David Raubenheimer, who grew up in Cape Town but now lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand, will be enlightening SciFest visitors with his take on the study of how animals relate to their environment through their interaction with food.
‘At the heart of these interactions is foraging,” says Raubenheimer. ‘While foraging, animals compose a diet by selecting foods and eating particular amounts of each. But why do they select what they do?”
He says that nutritional ecologists usually assume that animal foraging is geared mainly towards gaining a single food component — usually energy or protein.
‘But it is now becoming clear that foraging is far more complex and can’t be explained in relation to just one nutrient,” he says, adding that foods should be viewed as complex mixtures of many nutrients and foraging as a means of gaining a diet with the right balance of these nutrients.
Raubenheimer’s lecture, entitled ‘A New Approach to Nutrition: Locusts, Cockroaches, Flies and the Atkins Diet”, takes place in the Olive Shreiner Hall on the first floor of the Monument at 9.30am on March 24.
For another South African, Annie Bekker, the pursuit of the car of the future is her driving passion. Born and raised in Benoni, on Gauteng’s East Rand, Bekker pursued her interest in maths and science at the University of Stellenbosch’s faculty of mechanical engineering where she did her undergraduate and master’s degrees focusing on vibration and comfort of occupants of passenger vehicles.
Then, while visiting Mozambique, Bekker was struck by the visible effect of landmines and undertook a holiday project on injury mitigation in the development of landmineresistant vehicles.
This catapulted her career on to a completely different course, pushing her into a PhD in mechanical engineering on the dynamic characterisation of bone material at the University of Cape Town’s Blast Impact and Survivability Research Unit.
From UCT Bekker went into the private sector, joining Optimal Energy, the company responsible for designing and engineering Africa’s first battery electric vehicle — the Joule.
‘My lecture at SciFest will explore how comfort and appeal is affected by vibration and noise and which solutions can be engineered to reduce this,” she says.
Catch Bekker’s lecture — ‘Joule: Imagineering Mobility” — is at 9.30am on March 28 in the Olive Shreiner Hall.