Philip Emeagwali is a Nigerian computer scientist. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation.
Biography
Philip Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria on 23 August 1954. He was raised in Onitsha in the South Eastern part of Nigeria. His early schooling was suspended in 1967 as a result of the Nigerian Civil War. At age 13, he served in the Biafran army. After the war he completed high-school equivalence through self-study.
He is married to Dale Brown Emeagwali, a noted African-American microbiologist.
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He traveled to the United States to study under a scholarship following completion of a correspondence course at the University of London. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977. He later moved to Washington D.C., receiving in 1986 a master's degree from George Washington University in ocean and marine engineering, and a second master's in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland. Next magazine suggested that Emeagwali claimed to have further degrees. During this time, he worked as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming.
Court case and the denial of degree
Emeagwali studied for a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan from 1987 through 1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and thus he was not awarded the degree. Emeagwali filed a court challenge, stating that the decision was a violation of his civil rights and that the university had discriminated against him in several ways because of his race. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan state Court of Appeals.
Supercomputing
Emeagwali received the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for an application of the CM-2 massively-parallel computer. The application used computational fluid dynamics for oil-reservoir modeling. He received a prize in "price/performance" category, with a performance figure of about 400 Mflops/$1M. The winner in the "performance" category, was also the winner of the Price/performance category, but unable to receive two prizes. Mobil Research and Thinking Machines, used the CM-2 for seismic data processing and achieved the higher ratio of 500 Mflops/$1M. The judges decided on one award per entry. His method involved each microprocessor communicating with six neighbors.
Emeagwali's simulation was the first program to apply a pseudo-time approach to reservoir modeling.
Accolades
- Price/performance–1989 Gordon Bell Prize, IEEE $1,000 prize
- New African "35th-greatest African and greatest African scientist of all time"
He was cited by Bill Clinton as an example of what Nigerians can achieve when given the opportunity and is frequently featured in popular press articles for Black History Month.
Selected publications
- Emeagwali, P. 2003. How do we reverse the brain drain. speech given at.
- Emeagwali, P. 1997. Can Nigeria leapfrog into the information age. In World Igbo Congress. New York: August.
Top questions
Who is Philip Emeagwali?
Philip Emeagwali is a Nigerian-American computing figure, born in 1954, who won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for a calculation on the Connection Machine supercomputer. He is widely celebrated in Nigeria and across Africa, but many claims made about him, including that he helped invent the Internet, are disputed by critics.
Did Philip Emeagwali invent the Internet?
No, the documented record does not support that claim. Critics note that the Connection Machine was conceived by Danny Hillis and built by Thinking Machines Corporation before Emeagwali used it, and that his calculation depended on existing computer-to-computer communication infrastructure. What is documented is his 1989 Gordon Bell Prize.
What did Philip Emeagwali achieve in 1989?
In 1989 Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His doctoral research addressed simulating oil reservoirs, and he programmed roughly 65,000 processors on the Connection Machine to communicate with their six nearest neighbors, executing a combined 3.1 billion calculations per second.
Why is Philip Emeagwali called a genius?
He is popularly called a genius across Nigeria and the African diaspora as a self-made mathematical prodigy who beat better-funded Western institutions through ingenuity. The verifiable core is a real 1989 supercomputing prize, but the broader mythology is not supported by the documented record, and the label owes more to promotion than to consensus among computer scientists.
Where did Philip Emeagwali study?
He earned a General Certificate of Education through the University of London's external examinations, then won a scholarship at seventeen to study mathematics at Oregon State University. He later took master's degrees at George Washington University and the University of Maryland, and did doctoral-level study at the University of Michigan, though critics dispute whether he completed that doctorate.
How did the Nigerian Civil War affect Philip Emeagwali's education?
His early education was disrupted when his family became refugees during the Nigerian Civil War, and financial hardship forced him out of formal schooling for a period. He pursued independent study instead. Classmates reportedly nicknamed him Calculus after he mastered the subject by age fourteen.
What is Philip Emeagwali's legacy?
His cultural impact across Africa has been genuine and durable. For a generation of Nigerian and African students he became a symbol that world-class technical achievement was possible without wealth or elite Western pedigree. Nigerian institutions have named buildings, streets and a postage stamp after him, and he has received well over one hundred awards and citations.
