Philip Emeagwali
Philip Emeagwali (born in 1954) is an Igbo Nigerian-born engineer and computer scientist/geologist who was one of two winners of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, a prize from the IEEE, for his use of the Connection Machine supercomputer – a machine featuring over 65,000 parallel processors – to help analyze petroleum fields.
Biography
Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria on 23 August 1954.[1] He dropped out of school in 1967 because of the Nigerian-Biafran war. When he turned fourteen, he was conscripted into the Biafran army. After the war he completed a high-school equivalency through self-study and came to the United States to study at university under a scholarship. Actually, Emeagwali studied in England right after departing from Africa.[citation needed] He came to the United States later. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977. He received a master's degree in environmental engineering from George Washington University in 1981, and another master's degree in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986. He also received a post-master's degree in ocean, coastal and marine engineering from George Washington University in that year. He was also working as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming during this period.
Awards
Emeagwali received the $1,000[2] 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, based on an application of the CM-2 massively-parallel computer for oil-reservoir modeling. He won in the "price/performance" category, with a performance figure of 400 Mflops/$1M, corresponding to an absolute performance of 3.1 Gflops. (The winning entry in the "peak performance" category that year – coincidentally also for oil-related seismic data processing on a CM-2 – actually achieved 6 Gflops, or 500 Mflops/$1M, but the judges decided not to award both prizes to the same team.)[3] This simulation was the first program to apply a pseudo-time approach to reservoir modeling.[4]
Apart from the prize itself, there is no evidence that Emeagwali's work was ever accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, nor that it had any other lasting impact on the field of high-performance computing or the development of the Internet.[5] Neither does he hold any recognized patents for his results.[6] (He does, however, own a US trademark for his website name, "EMEAGWALI.COM".)[7] Nevertheless, Emeagwali was voted the "35th-greatest African (and greatest African scientist) of all time" in a survey by New African magazine.[8] His achievements were quoted in a speech by Bill Clinton as an example of what Nigerians could achieve when given the opportunity.[9] He is also a frequent feature of Black History Month articles in the popular press.[10][11]
Court case
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.[12]
References
- ^ Hamilton, Janice. Nigeria in Pictures. Page 70
- ^ Gordon Bell Prize Lectures
- ^ Gordon Bell Prize winners 1987-1999
- ^ Both Gordon Bell Prize Winners Tackle Oil Industry Problems, SIAM News 23(3), 1990; excerpted on Emeagwali's Web site.
- ^ As of December 2009, none of the Computer Science Bibliography, the CiteSeer Research Index, nor Google Scholar contain any record of either scientific publications by Emeagwali himself, or documented uses of his methods and results by other researchers in academia or industry.
- ^ African American inventors: Patent holders list (E)
- ^ EMEAGWALI.COM record at US Patent and Trademark Office
- ^ "Your 100 Greatest Africans of all time", New African, August 2004
- ^ Bill Clinton, Remarks to a Joint Session of the Nigerian National Assembly in Abuja, August 2000 (transcript)
- ^ "Innovators Who Break Barriers", CNNfyi.com, February 9, 2001
- ^ "Philip Emeagwali: A Calculating Move", TIME Black History Month feature, February 8, 2007
- ^ Michigan Appeals Court decision, Emeagwali v. University of Michigan, October 1999 (summary article)
External links
- emeagwali.com - Emeagwali's personal website.
- Biography of Emeagwali from IEEE
- "Self-Promotion and Self-Authentication: the Abuse of Cyber Pseudo-Anonymity. Part II: 'Father of the Internet'", BiafraNigeriaWorld, November 2003 - an article that highly critically examines Emeagwali's claims, describing them as "disingenuous"