Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:15, 14 May 2007

Philip Emeagwali (born 1954) is a Nigerian-born 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 analyse petroleum fields.

Biography

According to his website, Emeagwali was born in a remote Nigerian village in 1954. He dropped out of school in 1967 because of the Nigerian civil 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. 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 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 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.) Apart from the prize itself, there is no evidence that his 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.

Nevertheless, he has since received numerous further awards, ranging from one from the World Bank-IMF Africa Club to being voted the "35th-greatest African of all time" in a survey by New African magazine. His achievements were quoted in a speech by Bill Clinton as an example of what Nigerians could achieve when given the opportunity.

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, claiming 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.

References

1. Gordon Bell Prize winners 1987-1999
2. As of May 2007, 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.
3. Awards list at emeagwali.com, with photos
4. "Your 100 Greatest Africans of all time", New African, August 2004
5. Bill Clinton, Remarks to a Joint Session of the Nigerian National Assembly in Abuja, August 2000 (transcript)
6. Michigan Appeals Court decision, Emeagwali v. University of Michigan, October 1999 (summary article)

External links

• emeagwali.com - Emeagwali's personal website.
• "Innovators Who Break Barriers", CNNfyi.com Black History Month feature, February 9, 2001
• "Philip Emeagwali: A Calculating Move" TIME Black History Month feature, February 8, 2007
• SupernaturalMinds.com: Philip Emeagwali - biographical sketch from Stephen Palmer's Tesla fansite in Reno, NV

• 1954 births
• Living people
• Oregon State University alumni
• People of Nigerian descent
• Nigerian inventors
• George Washington University alumni