The UNESCO Courier - Volume 2023, Issue 1, 2023

It is often said that mathematics is everywhere. And so it is. A GPS receiver calculates its position by using the time it takes for satellite signals to reach it. Secure communications are encrypted so that they are opaque to anyone other than the recipient. The JPEG format of photos taken by a phone camera is a mathematical compression of the information contained in the photo. Without this clever compression, the photo files would be enormous.

Few weather events are as eagerly awaited as the Indian summer monsoon. The overcast skies cool down the blistering temperatures over much of the Indian subcontinent. For farmers, who make up nearly half the population and mostly depend on rain-fed agriculture, every aspect of the monsoon matters – which states will receive rain, when and how much. Therefore annual monsoon forecasts make headline news every year.

In Senegal, more than seven out of ten people are considered poor. This estimate is based on data collected through household income and consumption surveys, coupled with the population census. The problem is that such an approach is costly and requires significant human resources. In fact, many developing countries conduct such surveys only at rare intervals, which limits the monitoring of poverty. Another pitfall is that the traditional approach also provides an inaccurate picture of the situation.

From March 2020 to June 2022, Arnoldo Frigessi had a full agenda every day. The professor in statistics at the University of Oslo (UiO) and Oslo University Hospital was one of the scientists who worked for the Norwegian Institute of Public Health’s (NIPH) modelling team for COVID-19. Day and night.

For Joelle Lim, bouts of imposter syndrome sometimes hit when she falls short at work. In times like these, the 27-year-old cryptographer finds herself thinking of derogatory comments made by male acquaintances about female colleagues getting jobs because of affirmative action rather than merit.

The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) 2019 confirms what those on the ground have known for decades: South African school students are bad at maths. At primary school level, South Africa had the third lowest score out of the 64 countries. Things are no better at high school, where South Africa’s Grade 9 learners received the second lowest score out of 39 countries. Moreover, less than a third of all students in the final year of high school take maths – and only half of them pass their exams, according to data from the South African Institute of Professional Accountants (Midrand, Greater Johannesburg).

A rising star in Moroccan photography, Seif Kousmate documents life as it is today in the oases of southern Morocco. His project Waha (oasis in Arabic) takes us far beyond the trite clichés and fantasized representations of these oases.

Children occupying public places is a common theme in early 20th century street photography: they carry loads, wear backpacks to school, run around, float paper boats in Parisian gutters, or play in water sprayed from fire hydrants in New York – without an adult in sight. Nowadays, it’s hard to get such shots. The sight of young children playing, walking or cycling in public places without adult supervision has become rare.

Glaciers appear on almost every continent providing a large part of the fresh water we consume. But this indispensable resource is now threatened. Today we know that the glaciers in UNESCO World Heritage sites are retreating at an accelerated rate because of climate change. According to the latest report by UNESCO, in partnership with IUCN, World heritage glaciers: sentinels of climate change, they lose on average some 58 billion tons of ice every year – and contribute to almost 5 per cent of global sea-level rise.