Professor Heneri Dzinotyiweyi is probably the most successful mathematician produced by Zimbabwe to date. He was born on March 15, 1950. We skip the next few years of his life, only pausing to say that he went to Fletcher High School for Form 6. Then we come to his university life which started in 1971 when he enrolled at the then University of Rhodesia. There he first studied Mathematics, Physics and Geology, and then went on to Honours in Mathematics.
Unfortunately, due to the 1973 disturbances following student demonstrations against racism in the country and at the university in particular (student demonstrations here have a very long history!) he was arrested and imprisoned for the latter half of the year and had to complete his degree in private study outside Harare in 1974. He was the second (the first was J M Harvey, mentioned later) Honours student in Mathematics here, having been taught by people such as Gavin Hitchcock, Gordon Lampitt and Alastair Stewart, all still in the Department.
Immediately after his first degree he went to Botswana where he got a teaching post in August 1974. In December of that year he won a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, where he did his MSc in Mathematics in one year, and then moved on to work for his PhD in the area of functional analysis, at the same university. Unfortunately, when some way into his PhD project he discovered that his research topic had already been done, so had to turn to something else. He completed his PhD in 1977, and was awarded a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship to work at the Catholic University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
His first teaching post was at the University of Nairobi, but in mid-1979 he left to join the liberation struggle, which ended in 1980, and then he came back home and lectured at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ). In 1983 he rose to the rank of Associate Professor, and in 1987 he became Full Professor. He was chairman of the Mathematics Department from 1983 until 1991, when he was elected Dean of Science, the position he holds today.
So far he has written many mathematical papers and two books. One is a rather demanding first-year book entitled ``A First Course in Mathematical Analysis'', and the other an extremely advanced book in the Pitman Research Notes Series (#98) entitled ``The Analogue of the Group Algebra for Topological Semigroups'', which is mainly aimed at PhD students and other researchers in the field. He has visited 25 countries in the last 20 years. Besides being an internationally respected mathematician, he is well known in Zimbabwean industrial circles as he has served on the boards of several companies and organizations.
Finally, we get to the interview.
Zimaths: Have you seen any changes in your time in the dept?
Dzino: There have been changes in the dept since my time. Initially
the department was mainly concentrating on pure mathematics. We then developed the applied
and statistics areas in the department. Because of this, most of the Staff
Development Fellowships (scholarships given to postgraduate UZ students
so that they can get higher degrees, usually outside Zimbabwe, and also train to
teach at the university) at that time went to applied mathematics and
statistics. The area of statistics eventually became big enough to become a
separate department.
Which people have been through the UZ?
At the time of developing staff capacity, we sent
people such as
Dr D. P. Clemence (former chairman of maths), Dr Chareka (Chairman of
Statistics), Mr D. Vuma (Chairman of Maths), Dr Sibanda, Mr L. M. Mudehwe.
Dr N. Mudamburi,
Prof L. M. Nyagura (Pro Vice Chancellor, former student of Dzinotyiweyi
himself).
These are all people who went out of the country for their further
degrees and came back. There are others who are now abroad, doing
mathematics.
How many people have done their PhD here?
So far there has been only one --- Dr J M Harvey, who now
holds an executive management position with an insurance company. But he
worked part-time for the degree, while a full-time
lecturer in the Mathematics Department, and so took a long time to complete
it. At the moment there are
three Zimbabweans in the department doing their PhDs here.
Is this the fault of the Department or University?
The main problem is that people here study in isolation. A
lot of people give
up and leave, sometimes to study abroad. Outside Zimbabwe the environment
is better, and literature (books, papers and such-like, the staple
food of mathematicians) is more accessible.
For example, when I was studying at Aberdeen I was away for a lot of the time, because I could go (and did go) to the other universities which were around. This greatly helps in getting new ideas, and you advance much faster, as you will be unlikely to re-do what someone else has already done.
What about students who want to be mathematicians?
There are two things needed if you want to make it in
mathematics.
My belief is that a mathematician should be able to do any other subject, except perhaps the experimental subjects, as they require laboratory experience.
The point about being a mathematician is that you have the nerve to be able to take up any challenge, however remote from the subject it is. Actually it's more difficult for a mathematician to do research in maths than in many other subjects. The problem is that the people in industry think that the only people who are usable for the job are those specially trained in that field. The challenge for industry is this: take on mathematicians who are problem-solvers and can think clearly! Most institutions would benefit by absorbing mathematics graduates.
If you look at industries elsewhere they are using mathematicians a great deal. For example IBM has a lab in Munich which has about 300 scientists, of which the majority are mathematicians (a lot of mathematicians are employed in American labs, such as Bell Labs and Watson Research Center -- Ed).
If a student comes to the UZ to do mathematics, what are the possible
jobs at the moment?
Some can join teaching, which is not very popular with
graduands (at the moment). Others can join the insurance industry to
become actuaries, or they can join UZ itself. But, as I said before, in
principle they can do
anything. Banking is a good area for mathematicians, and maybe they
could eventually teach the bankers banking as well.
Industry should employ mathematicians as they are very good at research. Unfortunately, so far, what we call research in our industrial circles is (more often than not) only small adaptations of the current technology to Zimbabwe, otherwise known as tinkering, and not usually anything fundamental or original.
Why are there two departments of mathematics in the UZ?
Well.... the other department is called the Department
of Mathematics and Science Education. It is more concerned with mathematics education, but
the Mathematics Department concentrates on the fundamentals of
mathematics as a subject. So the two have different areas of concentration.
Mathematics will remain a useful tool for those who have it, if they use it properly. Sometimes the benefits of mathematics cannot be reaped immediately or directly. But this is the same with almost every field of endeavour, only that maths has received especially bad publicity. Maybe it's time to look at the subject more as an adventure, and less as an instrument of torture invented by teachers. Ko, dzinotyiweyiko samhu dzacho. (That's a pun in Shona, Prof Dzino's native language, meaning "What is there to fear in mathematics?"