Inspiring Biography: Dr. Philip Emeagwali - Father Of Modern Day Internet

Science And Technology news, Latest Discoveries, Innovations and breakthroughs and discussions.
Comment
User avatar
Excelsior
Senior
 

September 5th, 2018, 8:41 pm

Have you read about Philip Emeagwali? Not very likely. But this talent is known as the ‘father of modern day internet’ and the ‘Bill Gates of Africa.’ Wonder why? Read on.
Dr Philip.jpg
There’s more than one story told about the struggle of Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian Computer Scientist who has lived in the United States for so many years. The engineer, mathematician and geologist, one story says, just like other African children of his childhood days, may have dropped out of school at the age of 14 because his father could not afford his school fees. Another story says that he had to suspend his schooling when he was 13 to serve in the Biafran army. Whatever the case, one thing is for sure; at some point during his teen, his education was suspended. But in spite of all history has to say and all history has said, today Emeagwali is known as the ‘father of modern day internet’ and the ‘Bill Gates of Africa.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaQeENR7WdE Emeagwali was born into a modest family in Akure, Ondo State, on August 23, 1954. As an indigene of Anambra State, he was raised in Onitsha as the oldest of nine children and was considered a child prodigy because he was an excellent math student. He was so good at math that by the time he got to secondary school, he was performing so well he could even out-calculate his instructors and his classmates nicknamed him ‘calculus.’ After the suspension of his schooling when he was a teenager, his father took it upon himself to teach him. The civil war did not deter Emeagwali. On his part, he continued to study at the local public library after the war ended.

There, in the library, he taught himself advanced math, physics and chemistry. He studied so hard that at the age of 17, he completed his secondary school equivalency test and eventually won a scholarship to Oregon State University where he obtained a BS in mathematics. He also obtained three other degrees; a Ph.D. in Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan and two masters degrees from George Washington University.

He studied the nature of bees and after seeing the inherent efficiency in the way they worked with honeycomb, Emeagwali was determined to emulate this process in working on the world’s most efficient and powerful computer, the Connection Machine. This was achieved in 1989.

The Connection Machine utilises 65,000 computers linked in parallel to form the world’s fastest computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second and is faster than the theoretical top speed of the Cray Supercomputer.

The beauty of this discovery is that, it is programmed such that each of the microprocessors communicate with six other neighboring microprocessors at the same time. As a result of the success of his record-breaking experiment, there is now a practical, inexpensive machine to communicate with each other the world over. This network of interconnected computers communicating with each other all over the world is what is known as the World Wide Web or the internet. Even if this was in place before his award-winning discovery, Emeagwali had helped to reinvent it and given it an elevated status, thus becoming in the process, the father of modern day internet.

As one of the most famous African-American inventors of the 20th century, in 1989, Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize- the Nobel Prize for computation but after such great accomplishment, he did not just seat back and relax, feeling satisfied that he had achieved it all. At the Army High Performance Computing Research Centre, at the University of Minnesota, he conducts research on next generation supercomputers that will enable scientists and engineers to solve important problems in diverse fields such as meteorology, energy, the environment, health etc. And his computers are currently used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.

To him, supercomputing is a fascinating, challenging and critical technology that can be used to solve many important societal problems such as predicting the spread of AIDS and many other computational grand challenges. These are scientific problems whose accurate solution requires that a quadrillion or more arithmetical calculations be performed. Such problems are impossible to solve on traditional computers but massively parallel supercomputers will make it possible.

In a survey carried out by the New African Magazine, Emeagwali was voted the 35th-greatest African (and greatest African scientist) of all time. When listing the top 10 fathers of the computer, Emeagwali ranked number one in computer wizardry and ranked first by Google for contributing to the development of the computer. According to TIME magazine, Emeagwali is the ‘unsung hero’ behind the internet and the web owes much of its existence to him. And for former U.S. president, Bill Clinton, Emeagwali is one of the great minds of the Information Age.
https://leadership.ng/2018/09/02/philip ... ernet/amp/

See also: He's an intellectual inspiration http://emeagwali.com/education/new-jers ... 26-99.html

Please share...

User avatar
eMade
VIP VIP
Location: Abuja
 

September 5th, 2018, 8:47 pm

Wow. very inspiring. :clap:
Learn more about ✓ VIP Members: https://www.bestnaija.ng/61848 ✓ Referral: https://www.bestnaija.ng/62508
User avatar
Jegz
Senior
Location: Naija
 

September 5th, 2018, 9:01 pm

Wooah! I am inspired too.

Philip Emeagwali Rankings
Nine Refugees That Made a Difference
Top Five Nigerian Role Models
The 7 Most Respected Nigerians
Top 10 Igbo Legends That Have Put The Tribe Well High On The Map
Top Ten Inspiring Nigerians
Meet 13 Nigerians Who Got International Recognition
20 Most Influential Nigerians
Voted the Greatest Scientist of African Descent Ever
Voted the 35th Greatest Person of African Descent (pdf, html)
Top 70 Greatest Black Achievers.
Top 65 African Icons That Ever Lived
Famous Black People Who Changed the World
100 Persons That Changed the World

Philip Emeagwali ranked as:
The Second Greatest Genius in Mathematics
The Third Greatest Genius Alive
Voted "Father of the Modern Computer"
Meet the Top Ten Greatest Computer Scientists
Ranked First by Google for "contribution to the development of the computer"
99 Greatest Mathematicians Since Antiquity

See http://emeagwali.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/emeagwali https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPMciyzMiRc
"Many of us are not living our dreams simply because we are busy living our fears" - Les Brown
User avatar
eMade
VIP VIP
Location: Abuja
 

September 5th, 2018, 9:44 pm

It's hard to say who invented the Internet. There were many mathematicians and scientists who contributed to its development; computers were sending signals to each other as early as the 1950s. But the Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali, a math whiz who came up with the formula for allowing a large number of computers to communicate at once.

Emeagwali was born to a poor family in Akure, Nigeria, in 1954. Despite his brain for math, he had to drop out of school because his family, who had become war refugees, could no longer afford to send him. As a young man, he earned a general education certificate from the University of London and later degrees from George Washington University and the University of Maryland, as well as a doctoral fellowship from the University of Michigan.

At Michigan, he participated in the scientific community's debate on how to simulate the detection of oil reservoirs using a supercomputer. Growing up in an oil-rich nation and understanding how oil is drilled, Emeagwali decided to use this problem as the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Borrowing an idea from a science fiction story about predicting the weather, Emeagwali decided that rather than using 8 expensive supercomputers he would employ thousands of microprocessors to do the computation.

The only step left was to find 8 machines and connect them. (Remember, it was the 80s.) Through research, he found a machine called the Connection Machine at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which had sat unused after scientists had given up on figuring out how to make it simulate nuclear explosions. The machine was designed to run 65,536 interconnected microprocessors. In 1987, he applied for and was given permission to use the machine, and remotely from his Ann Arbor, Michigan, location he set the parameters and ran his program. In addition to correctly computing the amount of oil in the simulated reservoir, the machine was able to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second.

The crux of the discovery was that Emeagwali had programmed each of the microprocessors to talk to six neighboring microprocessors at the same time.

The success of this record-breaking experiment meant that there was now a practical and inexpensive way to use machines like this to speak to each other all over the world. Within a few years, the oil industry had seized upon this idea, then called the Hyperball International Network creating a virtual world wide web of ultrafast digital communication.

The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet. Since then, he has won more than 100 prizes for his work and Apple computer has used his microprocessor technology in their Power Mac G4 model. Today he lives in Washington with his wife and son.

"The Internet as we know it today did not cross my mind," Emeagwali told TIME. "I was hypothesizing a planetary-sized supercomputer and, broadly speaking, my focus was on how the present creates the future and how our image of the future inspires the present."
http://content.time.com/time/specials/p ... 57,00.html
Learn more about ✓ VIP Members: https://www.bestnaija.ng/61848 ✓ Referral: https://www.bestnaija.ng/62508
Abbeycity
Senior
 

September 5th, 2018, 10:03 pm

Inspiring and motivating story. Good to hear this :clap:
Discussyes is an online social forum where members interact freely on their desired topic of discussion.

Visit- http://discussyes.ml
User avatar
AK Horsfall
VIP VIP
Location: Port-Harcourt
 

September 5th, 2018, 11:49 pm

Wow, it was superb, super interesting :good:
I'm a living success and from a Royal Priesthood.
User avatar
Erudite
Senior
Location: Naija
 

September 6th, 2018, 5:41 am

Still part of the brain drain we talked about. The best brains have left Nigeria. More are still leaving. This environment is a dream and talent killer.
User avatar
Yinka
Senior
Location: Nigeria
 

September 6th, 2018, 6:18 am

This is really inspiring.If a Nigerian can do this,then we younger generation can do much better
User avatar
Excelsior
Senior
 

September 6th, 2018, 6:30 am

Erudite wrote:Still part of the brain drain we talked about. The best brains have left Nigeria. More are still leaving. This environment is a dream and talent killer.
True talk. America gave him the enabling environment to discover so much. If he had remained here most likely he would be a political thug now.
User avatar
eMade
VIP VIP
Location: Abuja
 

September 6th, 2018, 6:39 am

Excelsior wrote:
Erudite wrote:Still part of the brain drain we talked about. The best brains have left Nigeria. More are still leaving. This environment is a dream and talent killer.
True talk. America gave him the enabling environment to discover so much. If he had remained here most likely he would be a political thug now.
Or something worse. Brain Drain is a real problem. :what:
Learn more about ✓ VIP Members: https://www.bestnaija.ng/61848 ✓ Referral: https://www.bestnaija.ng/62508
Comment
  • Information
  • Online

    Users browsing this section: No members and 0 guests