Monday, February 02, 2004

Philip Emeagwali is a mathematician and computer scientist who invented an international computer network that was similar to but predated the Internet. In 1989 he won the Golden Bell Price, supercomputing's Nobel Prize, for inventing a formula that allows computers to perform their fastest computations

He was born in Nigeria in 1954 and was forced to leave school when he was 12. His family hid in a refugee camp during an ethnic cleansing that killed 50,000 people. When he was 14, he was forced into the Biafran army during one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars. When the war ended he was reunited with his family and he returned to school. But his parents could not afford to pay his fees and once again he had to leave school. Through self-study, he earned a diploma from the University of London in 1973 and subsequently won a scholarship to Oregon State.

In 1974, Emeagwali's interest in computing was inspired by a 1922 science-fiction article on how to use 64,000 mathematicians to forecast the weather for the whole Earth. He then worked out a design for using 64,000 computers, evenly distributed around Earth, to forecast the weather. His scheme was called the Hyperball international network of computers. Today, we call an international network of computers the Internet.

Peers initially rejected his design because they thought it was impossible. He was denied funding and employment for a decade until the U.S. government's prime nuclear weapons research center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, approved his usage of its computers. In 1998, he successfully programmed 65,536 separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second. This feat led to the reinvention of supercomputers.

-- By Dan Malerbo, Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & Observatory

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