This article was taken from the August 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="Apple-style-span">subscribing online.
The city is largely low-rise, although there are patches of new construction; buildings in the faded yellows and pinks that represent new west African modernism.
Roadsides bristle with billboards advertising mobile phones, televisions, beer and real estate. Traffic has grown along with the economy. Cars spill out on to the Cape Coast Road, which snakes from Nigeria's commercial hub of Lagos in the east to the battered but recovering Ivorian city of Abidjan in the west. Roughly at the midpoint -- about 50 kilometres west of Accra -- is Saltpond. Once the site of the earliest European military structures on the continent, the area is about to become home to the latest outpost of AIMS -- the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
The brainchild of South African cosmologist Neil Turok, one of Africa's most decorated scientists, AIMS is a bold initiative that seeks to create a new scientific class in Africa.
More than that, Turok hopes to advance science through the rest of the world by teasing from Africa's intelligentsia an individual who can re-imagine how we see the world. Turok intends to create a mathematical community by establishing mathematical bootcamps. He plans to build 15, with versions already in Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa.
Turok, 54, sees conditions in Africa today as comparative to those of eastern Europe 100 years ago: then, ambitious young Jews were suddenly granted access to education, and went on to make significant discoveries and advances in science.
Now it is the turn of Africans. "Einstein came from a very disadvantaged community, which had been completely excluded from university until the second half of the 19th century," he says in his office in Ontario, Canada, where he runs the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. "But once they got into university, that first generation, you start having Jacobi, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli.
This group completely revolutionised physics."
Turok talks with the long, measured tones of an experienced lecturer. His work involves looking at the largest structures of the universe and then, by examining the fundamental constructs of matter, seeking to explain how they are possible. It draws lines between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, which in some parts explains his journey from a modest attempt to bring some of his experience home to a continent-wide programme that he hopes could transform individuals -- and the continent. Africa's population is thought to have passed a billion in 2011 and, south of the Sahara, around 40 percent are under the age of 15. "You're talking about a huge body of people, and that includes brilliant individuals," Turok says. "And yet they have almost no opportunity to develop their minds further or to connect with the global science community... I don't think it's stretching things to say that when a continent with the diversity of Africa enters basic science in a big way, they're going to bring a whole lot of creativity and originality to bear."
A decade ago, Turok took a four-month sabbatical to travel with his daughter to Cape Town to be with her grandparents, the anti-apartheid activists Ben and Mary Turok. Ben, now an 85-year-old member of Parliament in South Africa representing the African National Congress, served three years in prison after a 1962 conviction under the Explosives Act. Mary, too, was jailed for helping the banned ANC. The family spent 25 years in exile.
Having grown up in such a politicised home, Neil gained a PhD in mathematical physics at Imperial College, London.
He then worked at the US Department of Energy's national laboratory Fermilab, the second-largest particle accelerator in the world. In 1992 he won the Institute of Physics' Maxwell Medal, awarded to a physicist early in his or her career who has made an outstanding contribution to theoretical, mathematical or computational physics.
After a professorship at Princeton, Turok took the chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge in 1997, working with Stephen Hawking to derive new solutions to the theory of an expansionary universe. "As an excuse to Cambridge, I said that I'd be spending the term trying to build partnerships with universities in South Africa," he says.
What he found, however, was that despite the economic resurgence that accompanied its reintegration with the international community, South Africa was lacking in mathematically skilled graduates. Every industry, from finance to telecoms and the government itself, was struggling to find technically trained people. The country -- in fact, the continent south of the Sahara -- lacked any institute that produced high-quality graduates in mathematical sciences. So Turok decided to build one -- AIMS. "It kind of seemed an obvious thing to do," he says. "To bring Africa's brightest students to South Africa and bring the best lecturers in the world to teach them."
AIMS now has a self-contained residential facility in Muizenberg, a suburb to the east of Cape Town. "I thought we could do it on the campus of a university, but very quickly came to the conclusion that that wasn't going to work... we more or less had to reinvent many aspects of graduate education," Turok says.
AIMS is not, however, just another university. Students do not sit endless exams; they are not led down predetermined paths of learning; and it is routine for those who enter in one discipline to leave on a totally different path.
In the campus's main building, students and lecturers live together. "Africa [is] the ideal place to be completely innovative in advanced education, because the need is huge and the opportunity is huge," says Turok. That process started, in true mathematical fashion, by taking scientific education back to first principles.
Many great universities are failing to keep pace with the outside world, Turok says. They are insular and departmental, forcing students down narrow channels of learning, and academics into publishing papers and attending conferences. Real discovery, and the kind of science that exists on the frontiers between traditional disciplines, has suffered. Turok wants to change that in a continent that is accustomed to exporting many of its brightest minds to Europe and north America. It is a combination of thousands of small miracles that he believes will endow young Africans from underfunded schools with surprisingly high standards of maths.
Africa does have one advantage: its people have long needed to rely on ingenuity to make up for limited resources. Whereas the developed world's economy shrank by nearly four percent in 2009, sub-Saharan Africa steamed on, expanding by almost three percent. That year, Ethiopia's GDP grew ten percent, Uganda's 7.2 percent -- albeit from a low base. International development has mostly focused on boosting primary education. But Turok believes spending on tertiary education could deliver disproportionate returns. He points out that investments in higher-level schooling are an accelerator for economic and social development, with South Korea and Singapore standing out as exemplars.
Graduates, particularly those with technical skills, are job creators and innovators and, more importantly, they are teachers. When development aid fails to build such a sustainable body of local expertise, Turok says, the recipient nation remains dependent on outside help. He was determined to change that -- and had a billionaire technologist in his sights. "Bill Gates made his fortune out of clever software, good software," Turok says. "Well, I say good software, sometimes, but software. So it seemed a complete natural
that AIMS should go to the Gates Foundation."
He took this up during a meeting with Gates's father, who chairs the foundation, in the early days of the institute's life. "I said, 'You're doing all this wonderful work on health in Africa, but how do you expect this to be sustainable when you're not also training the
people to run and evaluate those programmes? You're not training Africans to do it. What you're doing is using Washington consultants to judge the effectiveness of your aid. How do you imagine this is going to work without a local skilled set of people to implement
and evaluate and assess your programmes?'"
It is when recounting the response that Turok, who is usually calm and logical, betrays his intense irritation. He was, he says, told that the foundation "does education" in North America, and health in Africa. "I can see why the aid doesn't find it attractive to go to universities, but to neglect that is incredibly short-sighted," he says.
Rote learning, interdepartmental turf fighting and chronic underinvestment had become pronounced characteristics of African tertiary education. Turok chose to confront them head-on, in order to shake up the further education system from top to bottom. "The beauty of doing something in Africa is that you see all the systemic problems that you see in universities worldwide," he explains. "The difference here is that in Africa they're multiplied by a factor of 100, so they become absolutely blindingly obvious. Universities are extremely ivory tower. The relevance of the students' education to what they will ultimately be doing when they graduate is minimal. So these problems kind of hit us in the face when working in Africa, and we had no option but to do something radically different."
Turok and his colleagues tore up the textbook -- in their case taking the classic 1960s course devised by the Russian physicists Landau and Lifshitz -- and decided to throw it away in its entirety. "We scrapped the whole traditional curriculum and we said, 'Let's think about what scientists actually do now.'" The answer was build databases, play with software and use statistical models as a way of developing deep understanding of a subject. "There's a widely applicable toolkit, which is in practice what all scientists are using, but which is never taught," Turok says. One result has been that students begin the course without preconceived notions of where they want to end up. They use computers running Linux, rather than Windows, so that they can more directly influence how they work -- and change it. "We designed a very novel course, which is completely interdisciplinary. The course gives students a wide skill toolbox before they decide what they're going to specialise in. It essentially opens doors across the whole of science."
Students, visiting professors and tutors eat and sleep in the same residential campus. There are no exams, and the emphasis is on problem-solving and discussion. According to Professor Philip Maini, a mathematical biologist at Oxford and distinguished research fellow at AIMS, the resulting culture is far more conducive to interaction. "It's like a school where the teacher walks through the desks and asks the students questions. That's something that I never do in university. But doing that with the AIMS people meant you had a really good interaction," Maini says. "Maybe it was because my office was exactly opposite where they were working, but they would come into the office and ask questions... the students were thirsty for knowledge. They would take advantage of that."
For the students, it is worlds apart from any educational programme they may have enrolled onto before.
As Kidist Zeleke, who passed through the programme in 2007, says: "This is completely different. It's a 24-hour learning experience.
You don't think about passing a test or something. You dive into it. We have lectures every day for two hours, but the professors stay there, they live with us. Sometimes after the professors, teachers, there is some theorem that we don't understand, after 1am we hold a workshop with the tutors, and work the whole night...
AIMS is the first place that I got to call the professors by their first name." Zeleke now lives in Houston, Texas, where she is studying for a PhD in computational fluid dynamics, and writing a thesis on enantiomer separation in microfluidic flows.
Turok was awarded a TED Prize in 2008 for his work with AIMS. Winners are asked to make a wish.
Turok had just given a lecture to the 2008 cohort in Cape Town and, the following day, one of his students gave a talk to a visiting donor. The student ended her presentation by saying: "We want the next Einstein to be an African." "I was concerned it would sound too much like a slogan," Turok says, "so I called my most critical physics friends to ask: 'Does this sound like bullshit?'" The response was the opposite. Corporate, government and academic supporters have lined up behind the scheme. Its board includes Howard Alper, the chairman of Canada's Science, Technology and Innovation Council, Cambridge Mathematician Keith Moffatt, and Fernando Quevedo, director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste.
The Next Einstein Initiative, run from AIMS, is more a mindset than a competition -- there is no mechanism to identify an individual genius, and no prizes for the winner. On a continent starved of academic investment, it is inspiring a small core of mathematicians.
That Zeleke even graduated is a measure of the enormous progress being made by AIMS. She was born in a small village in the east of Ethiopia, and at three she moved to Dire Dawa, the country's second city. "There was no school in my village, but my dad wanted me to be educated, so he gave me to his sister," she says. The Ethiopian system assigns students to universities, rather than allowing them to choose, but having scored highly at school, Zeleke went to the capital, Addis Ababa, to read applied mathematics, with the intention of studying engineering. That changed in 2007, when an undergraduate algebra tutor suggested she apply to AIMS.
For 30-year-old Trust Chibawara, a mathematician who consistently topped his classes in South Africa, AIMS opened up the possibility of an academic career over a more conventional finance-industry. "When I got to AIMS I came with the mind that I was going to go into banking," he recalls. Working as a quantitative analyst in a bank was the logical step after graduation. "I had to convince people that I should do a masters degree," he says. "My peers wondered what I was doing: I was expected to be just getting a big job." Chibawara is applying for PhD positions in epidemiology and working as an academic coordinator on the Next Einstein initiative.
Three hundred and five students from more than 30 countries have graduated from AIMS. One, Zakariya Mohamed, heads the statistical department at the University of Khartoum. The institute produced Lesotho's first cosmologist. Its alumni are modelling the movement of disease vectors in East Africa, working in nuclear physics and writing financial models in London -- and they are talking to each other.
Donors are coming on board. The Canadian government has stumped up to expand the programme, and Turok has had encouraging conversations with the UK's Department for International Development about supporting another five centres, with Benin -- which tends to win African maths Olympiads at school level -- and even newly independent South Sudan on the list of potential sites.
The programme has demonstrated a sense of momentum and mission. As Kristina Eriksson, the Swedish physical chemist who will head up AIMS Ghana, says, there have been initiatives before, but they have lacked the financial, political and academic support that AIMS has had.
Could Turok's approach challenge traditional models of dependence? "We can run away from the idea that we have to wait for people to come and help us, we can do it ourselves. By Next Einstein, this is what we mean," Chibawara says. "Let African minds get out there and make them be relevant, contribute to the scientific world. Or let it be politics, let it be economics, let it be the development of young minds. Let it be entrepreneurship. Let us give them hope that they can do it."
Zeleke, who is returning to Ethiopia to help teach a course at the Dire Dawa university, agrees. "AIMS opened my eyes to new ways of looking at Africa's problems," she says. Politics is getting in the way, so science, she hopes, will give new solutions. "There are people who think we are genetically not designed to do maths and physics," she says. "It's not only Africa that needs science. Science itself needs input from Africa."
Pete Guest is a freelance writer and former editor of This is Africa magazine
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
