Ron Eglash is a mathematician and the author of African Fractals. According to him, concepts of fractal geometry resonate throughout many facets of African culture. He started out giving us a brief history of fractals. In the early 1900s, Helge von Koch was frustrated with the complex definition and set out to simplify the understanding….
Ivorian architect Issa is a partner in Koffi-Diabate Architects. His work marries African urbanity with local solutions. Exasperated with the worship of ethnicity, his goal as a designer is to create classic objects that travel easily. He shows a sketch by an artist of the city of Lagos, imagined 20 years ago. In seeking out…
Session 4 is entitled: Emergent Design Kwabena Boahen, PhD, is a Ghanaian bioengineer working at Stanford University. He received his first computer while growing up in Accra, Ghana. He starts out his presentation with a famous quote by Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, “In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask…
George Ayittey was meant to speak on day one, but for whatever reason was delayed. And I must admit it was worth the wait. One could almost say that for a speaker of this calibre and energy, you must pull out all the stops. Emeka Okafor, the program director of the TEDGlobal conference, took much…
Jacqueline is not new to the TED stage. She lives with Chris Anderson, the curator of TED and also delivered a talk at the previous TEDGlobal in Oxford. Jacqueline is a pioneer in what she calls “market-based philanthropy.” She went straight into sharing a story of 20 prostitutes in Kigali, Rwanda, who were running a…