Philip Emeagwali

Philip Emeagwali (born 1954) is a Nigerian-born computer scientist who was one of two winners of the 1989 Gordon Bell prize, a prize from the IEEE, for his use of the Connection Machine supercomputer to help analyse petroleum fields. He received 1000 USD for this award.

He is often featured in the popular press as a prominent African-American or Nigerian scientist, and claims on his website to be the "World's Most Searched-For Scientist", "Second Most Searched-For Nigerian", and "Eighth Most Searched-For African". He has received numerous other awards, ranging from one from the World Bank-IMF Africa Club to being voted the "35th-greatest African of all time" in a survey by New African magazine.

In the 1990s, Emeagwali was a visiting lecturer at several computer science departments. He now describes his work as a "public intellectual".

Emeagwali heavily promotes himself as a speaker for conferences. A large number of websites [1] (http://www.leonardo-davinci.info/leonardo-da-vinci/) [2] (http://nelson-mandela.info/nelson-mandela/nelson-rolihlahla-mandela-biography-picture-quote-speech-apartheid-photo-biografia-7.shtml) named after famous inventors and other great achievers, particularly African ones, have been created to promote Emeagwali. They feature brief biographies of them (copied verbatim from sources such as Project Gutenberg public domain texts and the World Book Encyclopedia), surrounded by many links to Emeagwali's site. The large number of links to Emeagwali's main site also boosts the prominence of it in search engines. As of February 2005, the relevant domain name whois records list the same person, Iya Nma Cheka, as the technical contact for these sites. Previously, Donita Brown, listed as one of the two contacts on Emeagwali's own site, was listed as the technical contact.

According to his website, Emeagwali was born in a "remote Nigerian village" in 1954. He dropped out of school in 1967 because of the Nigerian civil war. When he turned fourteen, he was conscripted into the Biafran army. After the end of the war, He completed a high-school equivalency through self-study and came to the United States to study at university under a scholarship scheme.

Contents

1 Court case 2 Emeagwali's popular media claims 3 See also 4 External links

Court case

Emeagwali studied for a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan from 1987 through 1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and was thus not awarded the degree. Emeagwali filed a court challenge, claiming that the decision was a violation of his civil rights and that the university had discriminated against him in several ways because of his race. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan state Court of Appeals.

Emeagwali's popular media claims

Emeagwali, on his website, claims that the Gordon Bell prize has been called "supercomputing's Nobel Prize". While it is a significant prize in the relatively narrow field of supercomputing, it is not in any way comparable in financial rewards, prestige, or recognition to the Nobel Prizes. In the wider field of computing, the Turing Award is regarded as by far the most prestigious award.

Emeagwali, cites CNN as describing him as "a father of the Internet", a claim that has been widely repeated in the popular press. This claim has not been paid much attention in the computer science and Internet communities. Emeagwali bases his claim on the notion that "the Supercomputer is the father of the internet", in that both a supercomputer and the Internet can be viewed as an interconnected network of processing units working cooperatively.

Supercomputers, and parallel processing, predate Emeagwali's work by decades. ENIAC, arguably the first general-purpose digital computer, featured some level of parallel processing. The first supercomputers described as such were probably those developed by a team led by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation. The Connection Machine hardware itself was developed at Thinking Machines by a team featuring a number of well-known computer scientists, at least partly based on founder Danny Hillis's doctoral work. The machines were used for a number of purposes well before Emeagwali's contribution.

Although supercomputing researchers often made use of the Internet as a way of remotely accessing machines, that is only one of many possible applications of the Internet. The Internet was born out of an interest in connecting disparate computer networks and has been used for a large number of purposes. Many different technologies from the 1960s and 1970s, including packet switching and local area networks, contributed to its development. It is generally agreed that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were key figures behind the early development of the protocols used by the Internet, but a huge number of other people contributed to improvments to this basic technology, implementing it on a wide variety of computers and making this implementation widely available, and developing the services that use the infrastructure of the internet (such as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web). Most of this work occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Emeagwali has not provided any evidence of involvement with any of this work.

Also, much of the development of Internet technical standards has taken place in the circulation of Request For Comments memoranda. Emeagwali has not authored a single Request for Comments memorandum, nor is he mentioned in any of the 4,000 already in existence, even though anyone may submit a RFC for publication after meeting the minimal formatting and structural requirements.

Emeagwali has not had any articles published in any journals or conferences published by the IEEE or the Association for Computing Machinery, the two largest and most prestigious bodies in the field of computing.

Some web sites state that he holds patents, for instance an article at the Lemelson-MIT inventor program [3] (http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/emeagwali.html), states that he "holds more than 30 patents". He is not listed in the USPTO patent database, which holds fully searchable records of all US patents dating back to 1976, nor in its pending application database, as of April 2004.

Emeagwali also claims to have performed the "world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989" [4] (http://emeagwali.com/interviews/Guardian/20.html). This is false; Emeagwali's Gordon Bell Prize was awarded for the best price/performance ratio; the winning entry in the absolute performance category performed almost double the number of calculations. The winning entry in the performance category also had a superior price/performance ratio to Emeagwali's solution; the judges decided to award only one prize to each entry and as the second-best entry Emeagwali received the price/performance prize [5] (http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/emeag.html). In subsequent years, various supercomputers have been used to perform computations far faster and more cost-effectively than Emeagwali as the inevitable result of Moore's Law and improvement in programming techniques.

See also

• History of the Internet

External links

• http://www.emeagwali.com - Emeagwali's personal website.
• http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0DXK/22_16/58614840/p1/article.jhtml - article describing the court decision
• http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/cezeilo/2003nov09.html - an article that highly critically examines Emeagwali's claims, describing them as "disingenuous".
• http://www.michbar.org/opinions/appeals/1999/102999/5473.html - appeals court decision.
• http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/emeag.html - a page dedicated to refuting "Emeagwali myths".