Loyiso G. Nongxa retired as an ad hominem Professor of Mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa on 31 December 2018. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand and Extraordinary Professor of the University of the Western Cape. He served for ten years, from 1 June 2003 to 31 May 2013, as Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa. He was born in rural South Africa in 1953, attended Healdtown High School, a school founded by the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in 1855. He attended the University of Fort Hare from 1973 to 1978. In 1977 he became the first South African of African ancestry to be awarded the Rhodes Scholarship. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1978 where he completed a doctorate in Mathematics (Abelian Group Theory) in 1982. He has served in various university leadership positions and during his 10-year term as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, the university had a special focus on broadening the university’s African footprint through its Pan-African University Partnerships Initiative. He returned to the University of the Witwatersrand in May 2014 as the Founding Director of a Centre for Mathematical and Computational Sciences whose objectives were to complement the activities of the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. He has been instrumental in an effort to establish a National Graduate Academy for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, a consortium of universities in South that collaborate around strengthening and rejuvenation of university mathematics and statistics in South Africa. In 2018 he was elected, for a 4-year term, as Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and a Member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa.
