Mathematical frontiersStephen Hawking looking for Africa's hidden talent

Professor Stephen Hawking, who has devoted his career to
finding the origins of the universe, is to begin a new search: Africa’s
answer to Einstein. The Times’s Jonathan Leake writes that despite suffering from motor neurone disease which has left him almost
completely paralyzed, Hawking, 66, has made the journey to South
Africa to launch the project last week.
Some of the world’s leading high-tech entrepreneurs and scientists have backed
the £75 million plan to create Africa’s
first postgraduate centers for advanced maths and physics, after the British
government declined to provide funding. Hawking was joined by eminent
physicists and mathematicians including two Nobel laureates in physics, David
Gross and George Smoot, and Michael Griffin, the head of NASA. “The world of
science needs Africa’s brilliant talents and I look forward to meeting
prospective young Einsteins from Africa,”
said Hawking.

Neil Turok, founder of the project and professor of
mathematical physics at Cambridge University,
where he is a close colleague of Hawking, said the aim of the centers was to
“unlock and nurture scientific talent” across Africa.
“Apart from an African Einstein, we want to find the African Bill Gates and the
Sergey Brins and Larry Pages of the future,” said Turok, referring to the
founders of Microsoft and Google. The fifteen new centers will be modeled on
the African Institute for Mathematical
Sciences (AIMS) which was founded by Turok in Muizenberg, near Cape
Town, four years ago. It has produced 160
graduates from 30 African countries, many of whom have gone on to take science
doctorates. Another fifty-three will graduate shortly. Among them is Buthaina
Adam, whose mathematical skills shone out in Sudan’s
war-torn Darfur province
where she grew up. With a physics degree from the University of Khartoum, she
hoped to become a nuclear physicist, but shortage of money and opportunities
left her career on hold until she was offered a place at Aims in 2006. “AIMS
gave me a life, opened doors for me,” said Adam, who hopes to return to Darfur
and teach after completing a Ph.D. Turok decided to push for fifteen more AIMS
institutes after winning the £50,000 Technology, Entertainment, and Design
prize in America
earlier this year. He donated the money to AIMS. He has since been offered
support potentially worth tens of millions of pounds. Google, the Gates
Foundation, and Sun Microsystems are among those that have expressed interest.
Turok and Hawking hope that AIMS’s students will help to overturn the negative
stereotypes of Africa that
were recently given expression by James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA. Watson
lost his job as director of the Cold Spring Harbor
laboratories in America
after suggesting that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans. A
subsequent analysis of his own DNA showed that he had part-African ancestry.
“Watson’s views were simply ridiculous,” said Turok. “The quality of students
we are seeing at AIMS is extremely high. What they need is an opportunity to
 learn.”

Turok’s hopes to persuade the British government to
rethink its refusal to fund the Aims project. “The Department for International
Development spends £1.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on aid to Africa
every year but there is precious little to show for it. The people who will
make Africa rich are the brightest people
because they will generate wealth,” Turok said. Andrew Mitchell, shadow
development secretary, was equally critical: “There is much more to Africa than
poverty and starvation. This is an extremely important initiative and I’m going
to see how the next Conservative government could support it.” The
international development department said it preferred to focus on projects to
fight poverty.