My Africa Today

Philip Emeagwali was voted history's greatest scientist (#1) of African descent — and the 35th greatest African of all time — in a survey for the September 2004 issue of the London-based New African magazine. President Bill Clinton extolled Philip Emeagwali as “the Bill Gates of Africa” but his fans countered that “Bill Gates is the Philip Emeagwali of America.” Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, the Nobel Prize of supercomputing.

In this day and age when Japanese, Chinese or anyone remotely resembling Asian descent is automatically presumed to hold superior mathematical and technological aptitude, Dr. Emeagwali poses a refreshing reminder (1) to the world that intellectual gifts come in all races, creeds and colors; and (2) to Igbos that when we strive for excellence, there is no limit to what we can achieve ... so strive for excellence!

Philip Emeagwali, biography, supercomputer scientist, Internet pioneer, mathematician, inventor.

So who is Philip Emeagwali, and what has he done that has made him so famous? Emeagwali first entered the international limelight in 1989 when he received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for performing the world's fastest calculation at 3.1 billion calculations per second. This calculation was remarkable not only because it was twice as fast as the previous world record, but also because of the method used to achieve this phenomenal task. Rather than use a multimillion dollar supercomputer, Emeagwali used the Internet to access 65,536 small computers simultaneously (called massively parallel computers).