Staff Reporter
University of the Free State (UFS) academic Professor Abdon Atangana has scooped another prestigious award for his outstanding work in mathematics.
The 35-year-old researcher received The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) Mohammad A Hamdan Award for his contribution to fractal mathematics and partial differential equations.
The Mohammad A Hamdan Award is being awarded for the first time and one of the prestigious accolades given by TWAS.
It is named after TWAS’s late vice president for the Arab region, Professor Mohammad A Hamdan.
Atangana told The Free Stater in a brief written response that he was excited for the recognition but he chose a scientific explanation for it.
“I am happy to see that, as a young black African, my contributions to mathematics and applied mathematics have had a butterfly effect in the world,” said Atangana, a researcher at the UFS Institute of Groundwater Studies.
The butterfly effect is an idea that is more commonly used in chaos theory. It suggests that a small change can make much bigger changes happen. According to the school of thought, one small incident can have a big impact on the future.
This prestigious award is given to scientists working and living in Africa or Arab regions for their outstanding work. ‘
It is given for outstanding mathematical work including pure and applied mathematics as well as probability and statistics.
Last month Atangana was named among the top one percent of outstanding scientists in the world after he made it to Clarivate Web of Science List 2020 for his groundbreaking work in mathematics and other related fields.
The Clarivate Web of Science List brings together an elite group of scientists recognised for their exceptional research influence through the production of multiple highly cited papers in the top one percent of citations in the Web of Science index.
Less than 6 200 or 0.1 percent of the world’s researchers enjoy this international recognition.
About 10 scientists from South Africa were selected and Atangana was the only mathematician.
He has developed several operators, sets and numerical methods which have since been introduced in mathematics and are being applied to solve real world problems in many fields of science, technology and engineering.
Several mathematical solving problems have been named after him and these include: Atangana-Baleanu fractional derivative in Caputo sense; Atangana-Baleanu fractional derivative in Riemann-Liouville sense; Atangana-Baleanu fractional integral; Atangana derivative with memory; Atangana Sumudu method; Atangana-Beta integral; Atangana-Sumudu transform; Atangana fractional derivative with two orders in Caputo sense; Atangana fractional derivative with two orders in Riemann-Liouville sense; Atangana-Gomez fractional differential operators with three orders in Riemann-Liouville sense; Atangana-Gomez fractional differential operators with three orders in Caputo sense; Atangana-Batogna numerical scheme and the Atangana-Toufik numerical scheme for solving ordinary differential equations.
He has also developed the Fractal-fractional differential and integral operators, Beta derivative and the Trinition, a new complex set with two imaginary parts.
Although sharp-witted with figures, Atangana doesn’t know how many mathematical operators and formulas he has developed.