Phillip emeagwali biography

Life Philip Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria. He lived in a refugee camp during the month long Nigeria-Biafra War in which one in fifteen Biafrans died.

Phillip emeagwali biography: Biography. Philip Emeagwali was born

At age 14 in Julyhe was conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the Oguta War Front to replace one of the Biafran soldiers that died a month earlier. Computers frustrated him, and he felt he did not need them. He resolved to become a mathematician, physicist, or astronomer — anything to avoid using computers. As his studies became more advanced and he was required to solve millions, billions, and trillions of calculations, he realized the benefit of computers and developed an interest in them, particularly in supercomputers.

Emeagwali claimed that racism inspired him to pursue supercomputer programming. He was granted access to a supercomputer owned by the U. His access was revoked when the manager discovered he was black; the manager felt that Emeagwali would find programming a supercomputer too difficult. So Emeagwali tracked down a faster but little-used supercomputer, called the Connection Machine, which sat idle because no one had figured out how to program it.

The lab chief was happy to find someone who was willing to try.

Phillip emeagwali biography: Philip Emeagwali (born August

In the seventies and eighties, few understood the science of programming supercomputers, so it was virtually impossible to get an education on the subject, according to Emeagwali on Emeagwali. He was essentially self-taught on computers. In the s Emeagwali arranged for 21 of his relatives to study and live in the United States. His eight siblings — who were eating one meal a day in Nigeria — all received college educations and went on to get good jobs.

It is how many people you helped to become successful. Those of us who are on top [have] the responsibility to help those at the bottom because someday we might find ourselves at the bottom. Before announcing his results, he broke his own record several times. Because of his engineering background, he was able to apply his technology to the petroleum industry.

Massively parallel supercomputing enabled petroleum engineers to figure out how to recover more petroleum from oil fields. The problem was previously considered by the U. On Emeagwali. In addition to his major professional accomplishments, Emeagwali values the paths he has forged for minorities in technology. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

In the s, the supercomputer was reinvented as a hypercube network. In a few decades, the computer will "disappear" into the Internet and, in essence, converge to a hyperball-shaped computing and communicating device. Emeagwali's Discoveries and Inventions Emeagwali's primary claim to fame was for solving one of the twenty most difficult problems in supercomputing.

His secondary claim to fame was for 40 discoveries and inventions that were synergistic by-products of his year project that resulted in a page report. His secondary discoveries include networks for supercomputers and the Internet, nine partial differential equations and nine algorithms for solving them.

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Emeagwali contributed to the body of knowledge used in reservoir simulators tools used to determine the best strategies for injecting water into an oilfield to eject oil and gas out of that field. The simulation of huge oilfields was classified in the s by the United States Government as one of the twenty most difficult problems in the supercomputing field.

Because his new equations incorporated inertial forces, they were more accurate and thus enabled enhanced oil recovery. Philip Emeagwali was born in AkureNigeria on 23 August His early schooling was suspended in as a result of the Nigerian Civil War. At age 13, he worked in the Biafran army. After the war he completed high-school equivalence through self-study.

He traveled to the United States to study under a scholarship following completion of a course at the University of London. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in Emeagwali studied for a Ph. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and thus he was not awarded the degree. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan state Court of Appeals.

The application used computational fluid dynamics for oil-reservoir modeling. The judges decided on one award per entry. Emeagwali's simulation was the first program to apply a pseudo-time approach to reservoir modeling. Emeagwali has made several controversial claims about his achievements that are widely disputed by scientific community and journalists.

Emeagwali said he was the first to program a hypercube "to solve a grand challenge defined as the 20 gold-ring problems in computing. That discovery, in part, inspired the reinvention of supercomputers as an Internet.