Remembrance of Nigerian Mathematician Chike Obi

Chike Obi (April 17, 1921 – March 13, 2008) was a Nigerian politician, mathematician and professor.

The African Mathematics Union suggests that he was the first Nigerian to hold a doctorate in mathematics. Dr. Obi's early research dealt mainly with the question of the existence of periodic solutions of non-linear ordinary differential equations. He successfully used the perturbation technique, and several of his publications greatly helped to stimulate research interest in this subject throughout the world and have become classics in the literature.

Obi is the author of several books and journals on mathematics and Nigerian politics.

Early Life and Education

Obi was educated in various parts of Nigeria before reading mathematics as an external student of the University of London. Immediately after his first degree, he won a scholarship to do research study at Pembroke College, Cambridge, followed by doctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, becoming in 1950, the first Nigerian to receive a PhD in mathematics.

Career as Mathematician

Obi returned to lecture at the premier Nigerian University of Ibadan. He was soon diverted from this by political activities. After the war, he returned to lecture in 1970 at the University of Lagos where he quickly rose to the senior academic role of a professor.

He left Lagos to return to his root in the city of Onitsha, establishing the Nanna Institute for Scientific Studies.

Obi had won the Sigvard Eklund Prize for original work in differential equation from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He was a university teacher until his retirement as an Emeritus Professor in 1985.

In 1997, Obi became the third person to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem after Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor in 1994. He also claimed to have found an elementary proof to Fermat’s Last Theorem. This work was carried out at his Nanna Institute for Scientific Studies in Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria and published in Algebras, Groups and Geometries. However, a review of this proof published in Mathematical Reviews indicates that it was a false proof.