http://emeagwali.com/images/website/titles/philip-emeagwali-1.jpg

                                                                                      

Life

Philip Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria. He lived in a refugee camp during the 30-month long Nigeria-Biafra War in which one in fifteen Biafrans died. At age 14 in July 1969, he was conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the Oguta War Front to replace one of the 500 Biafran soldiers that died a month earlier. After the war was over, he won a scholarship and arrived in the United States on March 24, 1974. In his White House speech of August 26, 2000, then U.S. President Bill Clinton ranked Philip Emeagwali as “one of the great minds of the Information Age.” The readers of New African magazine voted him as history's 35th greatest person of African descent. He is married with one son.

 

Invention

For half a century, the supercomputer solved only one problem at a time and did so because it was believed to be impossible to solve many problems at once. On the Fourth of July 1989, Philip Emeagwali invented how to solve 65,536 problems at once and solve them across an internet that is a global network of 65,536 processors. That invention changed the way we look at the computer and put the name Philip Emeagwali in newspapers and on postage stamps. He is in school reports for his contributions to the development of the computer.

 


More Info: emeagwali.com (complete biography and photos)
                   
YouTube.com/emeagwali (100 autobiographical lectures)