PHILIP EMEAGWALI (Bill Gate of Africa)

PHILIP EMEAGWALI (Bill Gate of Africa)

He was born on August 23, 1954, in Akure Nigeria, the son of James Emeagwali and his 16 year old wife, Agathar. In April 1967 he was withdrawn from Philip Emeagwali school as his family hid in refuges camps during an ethnic cleansing in which 50,000 Igbos Indigenes were killed. At the age of 14, he was Conscripted into Biafran Army as a child Soldier in one of Africa's bloodiest conflicts. After six months in the army, the civil war ended and he was reunited with his family. He attended school briefly and then dropped out again because his parents could not afford to pay his school fees.

He earned his first diploma from the University of London (through self study) in 1973 and subsequently, won a scholarship to Oregon State University. From 1977-93, he did graduate study. professional practice and academic research at Howard University (Civil Engineering), Maryland State Highway Administration (transportation engineering George Washington University (environmental, ocean, coastal and marine engineering), United States Bureau of reclamation (civil engineer), University of Maryland (Mathematics), University of Michigan (Scientific computing), University of Minnesota (Supper Computing), and Army High performance computing Research laboratory (research fellow). For six years, he served as a distinguished lecturer of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (the world's largest technical organization) and the Association for computing machinery (the oldest computer society). He has delivered many major lectureships all over the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural organization (UNESCO, Paris) and the International Congress on industrial and applied mathematics.

In 1974, Emeagwali read a 1922 science fiction article on how to use 64,000 Mathematicians to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. Inspired by that articles he worked out a theoretical scheme for using 64,000 far-flung processes that will be eventually distributed around the earth, to forecast the weather. He called it a Hyper Ball International network of computers. Today, an international network of computers is called the internet.

"It was his formula that used 65,000 Separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989", said CNN.

His success in using 64 binary thousand processors gave him credibility and renewed interest in his formerly rejected proposal use 64 thousand for flung computers to forecast the weather for the whole earth. Because the topology of his rejected international network of computers was similar to but predated that of the internet, it was rediscovered and called an "idea that was ahead of its time" and "a germinal seed of the internet". For his contributions, the book History of the Internet profiled him as an internet pioneer, was voted one of the twenty innovators of the internet, and CNN called him "A father of the internet."

Emeagwali has received more than 100 prices, awards and honors. These include the computer scientist of the year Award of the National Technical Association (1993), Distinguished Scientist Award of the World Bank (1998), Best Scientist in Africa Award of the Pan African Broadcasting, Heritage and Achievement Award (2001), Gallery of, prominent Refuges of the United National (2001), profiled in the book making it in America as one of "400 models of eminent Americans, and in who's who in 20 Country American. In a televised speech. as president, Bill Clinton described Emeagwali as "one of the great minds of the information Age".