“Don`t be hard like mathematical geometry”.
The quotation above is a line from a Zimbabwean dance hall artist called Donald ‘Sniper Storm’ Chirisa`s hit song, ‘Kuginyabvura’.
In the song, Chirisa reinforced the stereo type or rather the myth that mathematics is hard.
However, Guinea`s Ibrahima Sambégou Diallo may disagree with such a statement and even call it misleading as he has become the first African mathematician of the contemporary era to have elaborated a theorem.
The Guinea journalist who recently reconverted himself into mathematics has found the solution to the Goldbach’s conjecture, which is one of the oldest best unsolved mathematics problems of all times.
It took Ibrahima 14 years of hard work to finally come up with the answer that has roped him into the court of the great mathematicians of this world.
He had been in contest with some well-known and well-supported American researchers.
It is said that Ibrahima Sambégou Diallo has been knocking at all doors to validate his work.
Finding no support in his own country, Guinea, Ibrahima decided to go to Dakar, Senegal to validate his results at the mathematics institute there.
The Goldbach’s conjecture was elaborated 270 years ago by Christian Goldbach, tutor of the tsar Peter II, and employee in the Russian Foreign affairs’s ministry.
In 1742, Goldbach sent a letter to Euler, stating the Goldbach’s conjecture: “Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.”
This mathematical problem was so hard to solve that it took 270 years, and hundreds of mathematicians around the globe working on it.
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