The Nahmias Cipher Report

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 18:11 PM EDT,  7 March 2012 MASVINGO PROVINCE, Zimbabwe – Shocking news hit the internet six days ago when a 17-year-old HIV positive maid from Mupandawana, Gutu, was sentenced to a 10-year prison term for trying to infect her employer’s four-year-old child with the HIV virus. People deliberately infecting other […]

“Ethno-mathematician” Ron Eglash is the author of African Fractals, a book that examines the fractal patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa. By looking at aerial-view photos — and then following up with detailed research on the ground — Eglash discovered that many African villages are purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with self-similar shapes repeated in the rooms of the house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village, in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

Ayanna Nahmias, Editor-in-Chief Last Modified: 18:11 PM EDT, 08 March 2010 Tudor Parfitt’s remarkable journey to introduce the Lemba tribe to the world began with a lecture in South Africa on the Jews of Ethiopia. After meeting with the tribe, observing their lives and listening to their oral history, he returned to England where he […]