SEDIBA
Newsletter of the Sediba Project
Volume 10, number 2
July 2005
In this issue …
Minister opens science centre
National mathematics congress presented
in Kimberley
Well done, Sediba students
The error that wasn’t
Best students honoured
Writing numbers - the ancient Egyptian
way
Minister open science centre
The Science Centre at the Potchefstroom Campus of
the North-West University was officially launched on
Saterday 7 May by the Minister of Science and
Technology Mr. Mosibudi Mangena. This centre was
build and equipped in co-operation with the Department
of Science and Technology. It will fit in with the national
network of science centres and strive for the same
goals.
The important role of science centres in communities
was again highlighted at the 4th World Conference on
Science Centres held in Rio de Janeiro in April this year.
A total of 1200 representatives from 50 countries
attended. The global community of science centres
consists of more than 1200 centres that employs about
100 000 people. These centres attract about 250 000
visitors annually and inject about R10 billion in the
national economies.
“As we launch this science centre today, we need to be
realistic and seriously consider some of the major
challenges facing science in developing countries. Our
science centres need to become more relevant to the
context of our diverse nation and resources by striving to
include, among others, our indigenous scientific
knowledge and local innovations. Relevant and
appropriate exhibits need to be developed, which will
make science and technology relevant, exciting and
inspiring. Science centres should regard themselves as
a dynamic part of the science system by broadening the
views, and opening opportunities for our youth to see
and experience the wonders of science. In this way, they
will be making a valuable contribution towards the
achievement of the country’s innovation goals,” Mr
Mosibudi Mangena said at the opening of the centre.
PHOTO: The Minister of Science and Technology Mr
Mosibudi Mangena at the opening of the Science Centre
at the Potchefstoom Campus of North-West University
with Prof Jan Smit, head of the Centre and on the left
Prof Annette Combrink, rector of the Potchefstroom
Campus of the North-West University.
The centre is expected to play an important role in the
network, because it is situated at a university. This gives
it the advantage of valuable input by scientists,
engineers and educationists. The science centre is
equipt with a variety of exhibits, most of which were build
by technicians at the university’s well-equipped
workshop. This apparatus and exhibitions will be
available to other centres, locally and abroad.
Visitors can perform hands-on experiments at the
centre. The aim with these experiments is to bring
understanding of important concepts, laws and
principles in science. Experiments are presented in a
simple, attractive way and links between scientific
phenomena and everyday experiences are made
frequently. Educators are invited to bring their learners
to visit the centre. Kids will find it exiting to sep up and try
out activities and watch what happens - often observing
a result that is against what they expected to happen.
Adults will be guided to a deep understanding of the
principles and laws involved.
Videos and DVD will extend the experience of visitors.
Experiments too costly, dangerous or difficult to bring
into the centre will be covered by these visual aids. A
scheduled programme of exiting interactive science
demonstrations will be offered. The centre will always
grow and adapt. It will grow as science develops and will
adapt to the needs of the community it serves.
National mathematics congress
presented in Kimberley
ACE during graduation ceremonies in 2005. Two
students, Mr ME Maponya and Ms ME Raganya,
passed the course with honours.
The Eleventh Annual National Congress of the
Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa
took place at the National Institute for Higher Education
in Kimberley from 27 to 30 June this year.
The staff and management of Sediba wish to
congratulate all students who received certificates on a
job well done.
The programme centred round the theme "Towards a
Numerate and Mathematically Literate Society" and
included plenary lectures, panel discussions and
parallel session. parallel session. The maths market
session was a new feature during which publishers,
entrepreneurs and NGO's had the opportunity to exhibit
their material or to present it to small groups in thirty
minute sessions.
The error that wasn’t
Satyendra Nath Bose (January 1, 1894 - February 4,
1974) was an Indian physicist specialising in
mathematical physics.
The congress was attended by a number of Sediba
students as well as some of the mathematics lecturers.
Satyendra Bose
SCIENCE
CENTRE
Business hours: Monday - Friday, 09:00 - 16:00
BOOKINGS AND INFORMATION
Centre Manager, Mr Leon du Plessis:
Tel: 018 299 4236
Fax: 018 299 4203
E-mail: [email protected]
Well done, Sediba students!
Sediba students performed very well last year. The pass
rate for final year students was 89,4%. The pass rate for
students repeating the second year was 75,0%.
Mathematics students
Potchefstroom Campus: 48 second year students wrote
the final examination at the end of 2004 and 43 (89,6%)
of them received their Advanced Certificate in Education
(ACE) during the March or May graduation ceremonies
in 2005. Three students, Mr LS Motsoeneng, Mrs E
Phasha and Mr MA Shai, passed the course with
honours.
Vaal Triangle Campus: 88,8% of students who wrote the
final examination at the end of 2004 received their ACE
during graduation ceremonies in 2005. Two students,
Mr LJ Khophoche and Ms J Mokoena, passed the
course with honours.
Science students
47 second year students wrote the final examination at
the end of 2004 and 40 (85,1%) of them received their
Bose was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), the eldest of seven
children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the
Engineering Department of the East India Railway. Bose
attended Hindu High School in Calcutta, and later
attended Presidency College, also in Calcutta, always
earning the highest marks. From 1916 to 1921 he was a
lecturer in the physics department of Calcutta
University. In 1921, he joined the physics department of
the then recently founded University of Dhaka as a
lecturer. In 1926 he was made head of the physics
department at Dacca University where he stayed until
1945. At that time he returned to Calcutta and taught at
Calcutta University until 1956, when he retired and was
made professor emeritus.
While at Dacca University, Bose wrote a short article
called Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta,
based on a lecture he had given to his students. In this
lecture he intended to show that theory predicted results
not in accordance with experimental results. However,
Bose made an embarrassing statistical error that gave a
prediction that agreed with the experimental results - a
contradiction. Bose realised it might not be a mistake at
all. Physics journals refused to publish Bose's paper. It
was their contention that he had presented to them a
simple mistake, and Bose's findings were ignored.
Discouraged, he wrote to Albert Einstein, who
immediately agreed with him. Physicists stopped
laughing when Einstein sent Zeitschrift für Physik (a
leading physics journal at that time) his own paper to
accompany that of Bose.
Bose's work on the statistical mechanics of photons was
then formalised and generalised by Einstein. The result
of their efforts is the concept of a Bose-Einstein
condensate, governed by Bose-Einstein statistics,
which describes the statistical distribution of certain
types of identical particles now known as bosons. A
Bose-Einstein condensate is a gaseous superfluid
phase formed by atoms cooled to temperatures very
near to absolute zero. Several interesting properties
have already been observed in experiments. One of the
most interesting being that some condensates slow
down the speed of light within it to mere meters per
second, speeds which can be exceeded by a human on
a bicycle.
Best students honoured
Two Sediba students received awards during the
prestigious Annual Merit Award Ceremony organised by
the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Potchefstroom
University. The gala event was hosted by Professor
D.J. van Wyk (Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences)
and took place on Friday 25 February 2005.
The two Sediba students who were honoured are Mr
Marothi Ezekiel Maponya and Mr Leqetsa Sarel
Motsoeneng. Mr Motsoeneng received a merit
certificate for the best performance in mathematics for
the period 2003-2004, while Mr Maponya received a
certificate for the best performance in science for the
same period. Both also received a cash prize that was
sponsored by Naschem. The Sediba staff and
management wish to congratulate the two teachers on
their achievement.
"I hear a barking dog”
might be represented by the following pictures:
( bark +king
)
Of course the same symbols might mean something
different in a different context, so "an eye" might mean
"see" while "an ear" might signify "sound".
The Egyptians had a bases 10 system of hieroglyphs for
numerals, i.e. they had separate symbols for one unit,
one ten, one hundred, one thousand, one ten thousand,
one hundred thousand, and one million.
To make up the number 276, for example, fifteen
symbols were required: two "hundred" symbols, seven
"ten" symbols, and six "unit" symbols. The numbers
appeared thus:
Here is another example:
PHOTO: Students at the Annual Merit Award Ceremony.
From left to right: Mr Rathari Menyatso (NaschemDenel), Mr Marothi Ezekiel Maponya (best
performance, science), Mr Leqetsa Sarel Motsoeneng
(best performance, mathematics) and Prof Jan Smit
(SSMTE).
Writing numbers - the ancient
Egyptian way
The Egyptians had a writing system based on
hieroglyphs from around 3000 BC. Hieroglyphs are little
pictures representing words. It is easy to see how they
would denote the word "bird" by a little picture of a bird
but clearly without further development this system
cannot represent many words. The way round this
problem adopted by the ancient Egyptians was to use
the spoken sounds of words. For example, to illustrate
the idea with an English sentence, we can see how
These two examples are from a stone carving from
Karnak, dating from around 1500 BC, and now
displayed in the Louvre in Paris. As can easily be seen,
adding numeral hieroglyphs is easy. One just adds the
individual symbols, but replacing ten copies of a symbol
by a single symbol of the next higher value.
EBONS BOOKS
More on Professor Cohen-Tannoudji …
20, 200, 2000; etc. Here are versions of the hieratic
numerals
For supplementary exercises
grade 8 -12 in Physical Science.
Contact: Mrs. M. Vosloo
(018) 299 2415
Fractions to the ancient Egyptians were limited to unit
fractions (with the exception of the frequently used 2/3
and less frequently used 3/4). A unit fraction is of the
form 1/n where n is an integer and these were
represented in numeral hieroglyphs by placing the
symbol representing a "mouth", which meant "part",
above the number. Here are some examples:
Notice that when the number contained too many
symbols for the "part" sign to be placed over the whole
number, as in 1/249 , then the "part" symbol was just
placed over the "first part" of the number. [It was the first
part for here the number is read from right to left.]
We should point out that the hieroglyphs did not remain
the same throughout the two thousand or so years of the
ancient Egyptian civilisation. This civilisation is often
broken down into three distinct periods:
Old Kingdom - around 2700 BC to 2200 BC
Middle Kingdom - around 2100 BC to 1700 BC
New Kingdom - around 1600 BC to 1000 BC
Numeral hieroglyphs were somewhat different in these
different periods, yet retained a broadly similar style.
Another number system, which the Egyptians used after
the invention of writing on papyrus, was composed of
hieratic numerals. These numerals allowed numbers to
be written in a far more compact form yet using the
system required many more symbols to be memorised.
There were separate symbols for 1, 10, 100, 1000; 2,
Sediba is a project of the School of Science, Mathematics and
Technology Education of North-West University in conjunction with:
NASCHEM (DENEL), BILLITON DEVELOPMENT TRUST, NORTH WEST
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, UPSTREAM TRAINING TRUST, SASOL VAAL
EDUCATION, OLD MUTUAL, SPOORNET, ESKOM, AFRICAN CABLES,
SAB, FIRST RAND, SAFRIPOL, KARBOCHEM and DORBYL ENGINEERING.
Sediba Centre, Potchefstroom Campus, North-West University,
Private Bag X6001, Potchefstroom, 2520
Telephone and fax: (018) 299 2357
With this system numbers could be formed of a few
symbols. The number 9999 had just 4 hieratic symbols
instead of 36 hieroglyphs. One major difference
between the hieratic numerals and our own number
system was the hieratic numerals did not form a
positional system so the particular numerals could be
written in any order.
Here are two ways the Egyptians wrote 2765 in hieratic
numerals. (Note that the order is reversed in the second
example.)
Like the hieroglyphs, the hieratic symbols changed over
time but they underwent more changes with six distinct
periods. Initially the symbols that were used were quite
close to the corresponding hieroglyph but their form
diverged over time. The versions we give of the hieratic
numerals date from around 1800 BC. The two systems
ran in parallel for around 2000 years with the hieratic
symbols being used in writing on papyrus, while the
hieroglyphs continued to be used when carved on
stone.
Adapted from an article by J J O'Connor and E F Robertson at http://wwwhistory.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Egyptian_numerals.html