Dr. David Ssevviiri was in Maseno the last couple days; he’s a Ugandan mathematician currently in Kampala, educated in South Africa. David’s an incredibly bright guy, very interested in a kind of narrow research area of prime ideals (and prime modules) in ring theory. But he has a voracious appetite for learning new things, and seemed very happy to soak up as much algebraic combinatorics as I was willing to throw at him.
One of the things that was really clear in our conversations was the need for easier connections between African mathematicians and the rest of the world mathematics community. South Africa has been doing quite a lot (with plenty of international support) to ensure chances for the best mathematical brains in Africa to get a quality graduate education. Unfortunately, when the resulting mathematicians go back home, they are often cut off almost completely from the broader research world. This is because the research communities in most African countries are very small, and most of these countries don’t have a science budget to support research activities. Since much of the research funding in the developed world comes from national agencies like the NSF (in the US), this means there are very few opportunities for Africans to receive funding. Additionally, for international grants they are in direct competition with international researchers, and the University systems in Africa largely aren’t preparing people (yet) to be able to compete on level footing for these kinds of grants.
from set of 
things to a set of 
things is given by 
, where 
is the Sterling number of the second kind, which counts the ways of partioning an n-element set into k subsets. (And it’s pretty easy to backwards reason why the number of surjections is this number!) The number of injections 
is the falling factorial, 
.
Inventing Situations. 