PROFESSOR CHIDUME, TWO OTHERS BAG NATIONAL MERIT AWARD

President Muhammadu Buhari awarding the NNOM certificate to Dr. Okey Chidume on behalf of his late father Prof. Charles Chidume recently at the State House, Abuja

The African University of Science and Technology (AUST), a pan African university based in Abuja has expressed delight at the award of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM), the country’s highest honor for intellectual and artistic achievement, vested on two of the university dons, late Professor Charles Ejike Chidume, former Acting President of the university and Professor Godwin O. Samuel Ekhaguere, a visiting Professor in the Mathematics Institute, AUST.

Professor Chidume, an internationally recognized mathematics professor, beat over 1,200 contestants to clinch the honor.

Responding to these scholarly achievements, the acting president of AUST, Professor Azikiwe Peter Onwualu, FAS, at a special university session expressed delight over the rare feats achieved by the university’s distinguished professors by the awards they won.

According to him “By being among the three most recent NNOM laureates, Chidume and Ekhaguere have helped to elongate the list of winners of the most prestigious award for academic excellence not only from their states of origin but in Nigeria as a whole.”

Professor Onwualu said “AUST will continue to produce men and women of outstanding academic abilities because education explains the difference between a developed society and an undeveloped one”

Professor Chidume’s works encompass several fields including nonlinear functional analysis, nonlinear operator theory, Differential equation and nonlinear optimization among others.

Professor Ekhaguere who is a professor of mathematical physics on his part was so honoured because he created and pioneered the theory of Quantum Stochastic Differential Inclusion (QSDIs) that has greatly improved the entire science community’s understanding of those pathological quantum systems whose governing equation involves discontinuous coefficient.

Professor Charles Ejike Chidume, an indigene of Nimo in Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State, was trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) and Queen’s University in Canada as well as the Ohio State University in the United States.

He died at the age of 74 last year while serving as the acting President of the AUST, Abuja, after a successful long period at the UNN, International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Trieste, Italy as an outstanding scholar.

Dr. Okechukwu Chidume, one of the sons of late Professor Chidume received the posthumous award on behalf of his family and was accompanied to the award ceremony by the AUST acting President, Professor Azikiwe Peter Onwualu and Dr. Abdulmalik Usman, the acting Head of department of Mathematics at AUST.

It would be noted that the NNOM honor is like the Nobel Prize, awarded annually only to living individuals and organisations, however, Chidume received it from Buhari last week, because when he was selected as a laureate in 2020, he was still alive.

The awards could not be held last year on account of the lock down arising from the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AUST community felicitates with the awardees families for doing the university proud.