Erasto B. Mpemba

Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba He visited the Magamba Secondary School in Tanganyika, where he rediscovered the Mpemba effect when he was 13 years old. Upon earning his diploma, Mpemba rose to the position of Regional Natural Resources Officer in Mara Region in 1967. It took him eight years to fulfill his goal of studying abroad: He had retired from the Tanzanian Ministry as of 2011. However, TRT reports that he died on May 14, 2023.

Discovery of Mpemba effect Mpemba discovered the phenomenon at Magamba Secondary School in 1963 while preparing ice cream in a cooking course. His physics teacher at the time told him that his observation was clearly not possible. At the end of the presentation, Mpemba asked the question that had been bothering him for so long: “If you take two beakers with equal volumes of water, one at 35°C and the other at 100°C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100°C freezes first. Why?”