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.
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)