Ouagadougou: The director of the Science and Technology Training and Research Unit (UFR/ST) of Thomas Sankara University, Professor Oumar Traoré indicated that mathematics can contribute to the development of Burkina Faso, if users believe the results of mathematicians.“…, (We must) trust mathematicians. If we want mathematics to be useful to our country, we must believe in that first. And then, the mathematician will propose solutions. This is what we do, applied mathematics,” declared Professor Oumar Traoré.Professor Traoré spoke on Monday at Thomas Sankara University, during the opening of the African Mathematics School, an occasion where students at master's level and above and teacher-researchers in mathematics from the sub-region work on the modeling and control of the living world.According to the mathematician, doctoral students worked for example on the modeling of terrorism and its control and they obtained interesting results on the typical case of the Sahel.It remains, underlines Professor Oumar Traoré, for those primarily concerned, that is to say the users, to work with mathematicians to apply these available results.For him, the process does not often come to an end. Because, he argues, “in our contexts, people don’t trust mathematics. People don’t even see the necessity and their usefulness.”Elsewhere, this is not the case. When we look at what happened in certain countries. In South Korea, for example, we have seen and the mathematicians of this country confirm that mathematics has greatly influenced the evolution of their country, added Professor Traoré.According to him, the framework which brings them together will allow us to reflect on the modeling and control of phenomena from the living world. This concerns more generally all the phenomena of life that man seeks to control.Once the state of research has passed, it is up to practitioners to use the results obtained for their applications in concrete everyday areas, because mathematics can help in decision-making, he concluded.Source: Burkina Information Agency
