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 analyze petroleum fields.
Philip Emeagwali came from a poor family in Nigeria, and was largely self-taught, earning his first diploma from the University of London in 1973. During the 1970s and '80s, he furthered his education in the U.S. studying mathematics and environmental engineering. By 1988, Emeagwali invented an advance formula for the Internet that enabled more than 65,000 networked processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second, a record-breaking achievement that rejuvenated the world of supercomputing. Since that time he has been called "a father of the Internet.
At the age of eight, Philip Emeagwali, would sit in the study in his southeastern Nigeria home where his father would drill him on various subjects for hours. Philips father would question him, from experience, Philip knew he would get 100 questions an hour and had 36 seconds to answer each question while calculating answers in his head.
Emeagwali's discovery started making front page headlines and cover stories in 1989, a feat that is a rarity in science. A measure of his impact is that he was rewarded with the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize (supercomputing's Nobel Prize) for his contributions which, in part, inspired the petroleum industry to purchase one in ten supercomputers.
