Dr. Philip Emeagwali

(1954-present)


Dr. Emeagwali the inventor of the worlds fastest computer

Dr. Philip Emeagmali: by Darren Vance 

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  • Emeagwali's childhood

    3

  • The Education of Philip Emeagwali

    4

  • Some accomplishments

    5

  • The Pursuit of Education Leads to Success

    6

  • How the supercomputer works and what this did

    7
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A family photo taken with Emeagwali and his cousin Charles (third from right) with him standing on the right (December 1962 at Uromi, Nigeria). He dropped out of school four and half years later.

Philip Emeagwali (1954- )

Emeagwali was born August 23, 1954 in Akure, a remote  village in Nigera. He was the oldest of nine children and was considered a child prodigy because he was an excellent math student. His father spent lots of time helping and nurturing Emeagwali with mathematics. He was so good in math that by the time he got to high school, he was performing so well that his classmates nicknamed him "Calculus."

 A couple years after he dropped out of school, a civil war broke out and he was drafted into the Biafran army. That did not deter Emeagwali, and when the war ended, he continued to study at the local public library. There, in the library, he taught himself advanced math, physics, and chemistry by studying on his own, and at the age of 17, completed his high school equivalency test and won a scholarship to study mathematics at Oregon State University.

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Dr. Philip Emeagwali is also known as the "Bill Gates of Africa". He was born in Nigeria in the year 1957. Like many African schoolchildren, he dropped out of school at age 14 because his father could not continue paying the fees to keep him in school. However, his father continued teaching him at home, and everyday Emeagwali performed mental exercises such as solving 100 math problems in one hour. His father taught him until Philip "knew more than his father did he did."

Growing up in a country torn by civil war, Emeagwali lived in a building crumbled by rocket shells. He believed his intellect was a way out of the line of fire. So he studied hard and eventually received a scholarship to Oregon State University when he was 17 where he obtained a BS in mathematics. He also earned three other degrees - a Ph.D. in Scientific computing from the University of Michigan and two Masters degrees from George Washington University.

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Dr. Philip Emeagwali also received acclaim based, at least in part, on his study of nature, specifically bees. Emeagwali saw an inherent efficiency in the way bees construct and work with honeycomb and determined computers that emulate this process would be the more efficient and more powerful. In the year 1989, emulating the bees' honeycomb construction, Emeagwali used 65,000 processors to invent the world's fastest computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second.

Dr. Philip Emeagwali's resume is loaded with many other such feats, including ways of making oil fields more productive - which has resulted in the United States saving hundreds of millions of dollars each year. As one of the most famous African-American inventors of the 20th century, Dr. Emeagwali also has won the Gordon Bell Prize - the Nobel Prize for computation. His computers are currently being used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.
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The connection machine

Emeagwali wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer. He could not study these subjects at the cutting-edge level in Africa, so he came to the United States. During the week that he arrived in the United States, he went to an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in his life.

In 1989 he won the Gordon Bell Prize. He accessed the Connection Machine over the Internet. The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to him because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time. In fact, the national laboratories that purchased them were embarrassed because their scientists could not program them and they were hardly being used. The labs were happy that Emeagwali was brave enough to attempt to program it and the million computer was left entirely to his use. He was, in a sense, their human guinea pig.

Today, he has access to a million super computer while many African scientists do not have access to any personal computer. The greater opportunity enabled him to make important discoveries and inventions.

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The Connection Machine was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is a complex supercomputer, briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected. The processing nodes are configured as a cube in a 12-dimensional universe, although we only use it to solve problems arising from our three-dimensional universe.

To perform the world's fastest computation, he divided and evenly distributed the calculations among the 65,536 processors and then squeezed the most  performance from the each processor. It took him 1057 pages to describe the hundreds of mathematical equations, algorithms and programming techniques that he invented and used. The details would be of interest to mathematicians and super computer nerds only. This discovery helps analyze petroleum fields and does massive calculations.

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