He says five students gain world-class post-graduate training there for the cost of one in the west.

Kidist Zeleke, a 2007 AIMS graduate from Ethiopia, is now completing her math Ph.D at the University of Houston.

She says, “There is almost nowhere in the world of higher education where you can be in a non-stop learning environment. AIMS was the place where I have drawn courage and hope for the future of Africa; where I was convinced that science and technology is the main way, if not the only, to solve the grand challenges in the continent.”

Meanwhile, Turok concedes that the curriculum was expanded in 2008 to include practical — if less exotic — courses in entrepreneurship, computer science and policy study.

Still, the focus remains on the kind of science which even some western universities regard as a luxury.

It’s perhaps telling that Turok’s billionaire “boss” has already made the same gamble.

The co-founder of Blackberry, Mike Lazaridis didn’t donate his disposable cash to charity, political causes or small business start-ups as other billionaire pioneers have done.

Instead – with his eyes still set firmly on return on investment – the entrepreneur launched a Canadian institute for research into the most exotic physics out there, from quantum field theory to extra-dimensional cosmology.

He poached Turok to be director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, with a brief to incubate the kind of research which might launch new technologies – notwithstanding Turok’s joke that, for any economy, “a cosmologist is probably the most useless person on the planet.”

So what does Lazaridis know that the rest of us don’t? In a recent interview with local Canadian media, he said information processing was increasing so fast that digital technology would soon be redundant; that a theoretical framework would be needed for quantum and nano machines.

“I started to see that there’s a crisis coming where, based on Moore’s Laws predictions, as transistors and lithography and integrated circuits become smaller and smaller every 18 months or so, we’re going to reach the point where things become the size of atoms. And that’s expected to happen anywhere between 2015 and 2020,” Lazaridis said.

Turok said he immediately recognized an opportunity for Africa. While the west clings to its digital age, Africans could skip that tech generation and zoom right past.