Dossier 2009 : Philip Emeagwali
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Philip Emeagwali
Hailed as "the Bill Gates of Africa" by then-president Bill Clinton, Philip Emeagwali is a war survivor and renowned pioneer of the supercomputer and the Internet. "The Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali," observed TIME magazine. CNN has called him "a father of the Internet."
He was born on August 23, 1954, in Nigeria. At an early age, he developed a love for mathematics and earned the nickname "Calculus." With two million others, Emeagwali fled persecution to the safety of Biafran refugee camps during Nigeria's 30-month civil war that began in July 1967, which killed one million people. He was conscripted into the Biafran army at age 14, won a scholarship to the United States at age 19.
In his adopted country, Emeagwali became fascinated with what he called the "HyperBall," a theorized supercomputer equivalent to an idealized Internet. He began programming in 1974 and because he could not find a research laboratory interested in his HyperBall, he conducted research alone for 15 years, delving deeply into the deep connections between motion, calculus, and computing.
In 1989, he shocked the computing industry by winning singlehandedly, as an unknown, the Gordon Bell Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of supercomputing." He reformulated Newton's Second Law of Motion as 18 "grand challenge" equations and algorithms and then re-created those as 24 million algebraic equations. By programming 65,000 processors to work as one seamless unit, he solved those 24 million equations at a speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second, setting three world records and garnering international headlines.
This discovery that 65,000 processors can solve a grand challenge defined as the 20 gold-ring problems in computing, in part, inspired the reinvention of supercomputers as a union of vast numbers of processors communicating as an Internet. He is profiled in books on the history of the Internet because his discovery suggested a re-definition of the computer of the mid 21st century ¬ as "a device communicating as an Internet while computing with thousands of processors," instead of one.
By expanding the limits of computing, Emeagwali has helped to move humanity forward into the age of information, which prompted president Bill Clinton to extol him as "one of the great minds of the Information Age."
In his native Nigeria, he is hailed as national hero, his likeness appearing on the nation's postage stamps and on the continent's music videos. He has been cited in numerous polls and lists of history's greatest black achievers, by publications ranging from New African to Ebony.
Emeagwali has won city-wide tennis tournaments. He is married to Dale, a prominent molecular biologist, and they have a son, Ijeoma, who is studying computer engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He travels from Washington, D.C.
An Open Letter to Martin Luther King
by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com
Walk with me down memory lane. The time: 1968. In 30 months, one million dead. The setting: a dusty camp in Biafra where survivors waited and hoped for peace. The survivors: Refugees fleeing from the “Dance of Death.” My mentor: One of the refugee camp directors, whom I called “Teacher” out of respect.
“Martin Luther King has been killed,” Teacher said, with a pained voice and vacant eyes. I looked towards Teacher, wondering: “Who is Martin Luther King?” I was a 13-year-old refugee in the west African nation of Nigeria, a land then called Biafra. Martin Luther King. What did that name mean?
Eight out of ten Biafrans were refugees exiled from their own country. Two years earlier, Christian army officers had staged a bloody coup killing Muslim leaders. The Muslims felt the coup was a tribal mutiny of Christian Igbos against their beloved leaders. The aggrieved Muslims went on a killing rampage, chanting: “Igbo, Igbo, Igbo, you are no longer part of Nigeria!” In the days that followed, 50,000 Igbos were killed in street uprisings.
Killing was not new to us in Biafra. I was 13, but I knew much of killing. Widows and orphans were most of the refugees in our camp. They had survived the Igbo “Dance of Death” — a euphemism for the mass executions. One thousand men at gunpoint forced to dance a public dance. Seven hundred were then shot and buried en masse in shallow graves. When told to hurry up and return to his regular duty, one of the murderers said: “The graves are not yet full.”
A few days later, with only the clothes on our backs, we fled from this “Dance of Death.” That was six months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Teacher and I were eventually conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the front, two years after our escape.
After the war, Teacher – who had taught me the name of Martin Luther King — was among the one million who had died. I — a child soldier – was one of the fifteen million who survived.
Africa is committing suicide: a two-decade war in Sudan, genocidal killings in Rwanda, scorched-earth conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, and Liberia. The wars in modern Africa are the largest global-scale loss of life since the establishment of the Atlantic Slave trade, which uprooted and scattered Africa’s sons and daughters across the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil.
Africa’s wars are steering the continent toward a sea of self-destruction so deep that even the greatest horror writers are unable to fathom its depths. So, given our circumstances, Martin Luther King was a name unknown, a dead man among millions, with a message that never reached the shores of Biafra.
Neither did his message reach the ears of “The Black Scorpion,” Benjamin Adekunle, a tough Nigerian army commander, whose credo of ethnic cleansing knew nothing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces move into Igbo territory, we even shoot things that do not move.”
As we heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call, and march together across the world stage, let us never forget that we who have witnessed and survived the injustice of such nonsensical wars are the torchbearers of his legacy of peace for our world, our nation, and our children.
Transcribed from speech delivered by Philip Emeagwali on April 4, 2008 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia at the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The entire transcript and video are posted at emeagwali.com.
Philip Emeagwali was inducted into the gallery of history's 70 greatest black achievers by the International Slavery Museum and into the Gallery of Prominent Refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Beyond the Last Computer
by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com
I felt the hard, cold steel of a gun against the back of my head. I spun around and saw my assailant’s finger shaking on the trigger: “Don't run or I'll shoot you,” he said. I was just 14 years old, and death was a stranger to me.
It was 1969, and Nigeria was embroiled in civil war. As a teenage refugee conscripted into the Biafran Army, I was forced at gunpoint to carry weapons to the Oguta front. It was a 24-hour, march through mosquito-infested mangroves flooded by the River Niger.
When the 30-month war ended on January 15, 1970, I was discharged and reunited with my parents. Together with one million returning refugees we walked for three days, avoiding landmines along fetid rainforest footpaths. Eventually, we reached our hometown of Onitsha. It was badly battered by the war.
There my thoughts returned to a love abandoned three years earlier—mathematical physics. This love affair blossomed when I was a refugee in Biafra, —shortly before July 20, 1969—the day man first walked on the moon. While running an errand, I stopped to gaze through a classroom window and saw a physics lecturer writing on a blackboard. It<
Hailed as "the Bill Gates of Africa" by then-president Bill Clinton, Philip Emeagwali is a war survivor and renowned pioneer of the supercomputer and the Internet. "The Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali," observed TIME magazine. CNN has called him "a father of the Internet."
He was born on August 23, 1954, in Nigeria. At an early age, he developed a love for mathematics and earned the nickname "Calculus." With two million others, Emeagwali fled persecution to the safety of Biafran refugee camps during Nigeria's 30-month civil war that began in July 1967, which killed one million people. He was conscripted into the Biafran army at age 14, won a scholarship to the United States at age 19.
In his adopted country, Emeagwali became fascinated with what he called the "HyperBall," a theorized supercomputer equivalent to an idealized Internet. He began programming in 1974 and because he could not find a research laboratory interested in his HyperBall, he conducted research alone for 15 years, delving deeply into the deep connections between motion, calculus, and computing.
In 1989, he shocked the computing industry by winning singlehandedly, as an unknown, the Gordon Bell Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of supercomputing." He reformulated Newton's Second Law of Motion as 18 "grand challenge" equations and algorithms and then re-created those as 24 million algebraic equations. By programming 65,000 processors to work as one seamless unit, he solved those 24 million equations at a speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second, setting three world records and garnering international headlines.
This discovery that 65,000 processors can solve a grand challenge defined as the 20 gold-ring problems in computing, in part, inspired the reinvention of supercomputers as a union of vast numbers of processors communicating as an Internet. He is profiled in books on the history of the Internet because his discovery suggested a re-definition of the computer of the mid 21st century ¬ as "a device communicating as an Internet while computing with thousands of processors," instead of one.
By expanding the limits of computing, Emeagwali has helped to move humanity forward into the age of information, which prompted president Bill Clinton to extol him as "one of the great minds of the Information Age."
In his native Nigeria, he is hailed as national hero, his likeness appearing on the nation's postage stamps and on the continent's music videos. He has been cited in numerous polls and lists of history's greatest black achievers, by publications ranging from New African to Ebony.
Emeagwali has won city-wide tennis tournaments. He is married to Dale, a prominent molecular biologist, and they have a son, Ijeoma, who is studying computer engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He travels from Washington, D.C.
An Open Letter to Martin Luther King
by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com
Walk with me down memory lane. The time: 1968. In 30 months, one million dead. The setting: a dusty camp in Biafra where survivors waited and hoped for peace. The survivors: Refugees fleeing from the “Dance of Death.” My mentor: One of the refugee camp directors, whom I called “Teacher” out of respect.
“Martin Luther King has been killed,” Teacher said, with a pained voice and vacant eyes. I looked towards Teacher, wondering: “Who is Martin Luther King?” I was a 13-year-old refugee in the west African nation of Nigeria, a land then called Biafra. Martin Luther King. What did that name mean?
Eight out of ten Biafrans were refugees exiled from their own country. Two years earlier, Christian army officers had staged a bloody coup killing Muslim leaders. The Muslims felt the coup was a tribal mutiny of Christian Igbos against their beloved leaders. The aggrieved Muslims went on a killing rampage, chanting: “Igbo, Igbo, Igbo, you are no longer part of Nigeria!” In the days that followed, 50,000 Igbos were killed in street uprisings.
Killing was not new to us in Biafra. I was 13, but I knew much of killing. Widows and orphans were most of the refugees in our camp. They had survived the Igbo “Dance of Death” — a euphemism for the mass executions. One thousand men at gunpoint forced to dance a public dance. Seven hundred were then shot and buried en masse in shallow graves. When told to hurry up and return to his regular duty, one of the murderers said: “The graves are not yet full.”
A few days later, with only the clothes on our backs, we fled from this “Dance of Death.” That was six months before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Teacher and I were eventually conscripted into the Biafran army and sent to the front, two years after our escape.
After the war, Teacher – who had taught me the name of Martin Luther King — was among the one million who had died. I — a child soldier – was one of the fifteen million who survived.
Africa is committing suicide: a two-decade war in Sudan, genocidal killings in Rwanda, scorched-earth conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, and Liberia. The wars in modern Africa are the largest global-scale loss of life since the establishment of the Atlantic Slave trade, which uprooted and scattered Africa’s sons and daughters across the United States, Jamaica, and Brazil.
Africa’s wars are steering the continent toward a sea of self-destruction so deep that even the greatest horror writers are unable to fathom its depths. So, given our circumstances, Martin Luther King was a name unknown, a dead man among millions, with a message that never reached the shores of Biafra.
Neither did his message reach the ears of “The Black Scorpion,” Benjamin Adekunle, a tough Nigerian army commander, whose credo of ethnic cleansing knew nothing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement: “We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces move into Igbo territory, we even shoot things that do not move.”
As we heed Martin Luther King Jr.’s call, and march together across the world stage, let us never forget that we who have witnessed and survived the injustice of such nonsensical wars are the torchbearers of his legacy of peace for our world, our nation, and our children.
Transcribed from speech delivered by Philip Emeagwali on April 4, 2008 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia at the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The entire transcript and video are posted at emeagwali.com.
Philip Emeagwali was inducted into the gallery of history's 70 greatest black achievers by the International Slavery Museum and into the Gallery of Prominent Refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Beyond the Last Computer
by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com
I felt the hard, cold steel of a gun against the back of my head. I spun around and saw my assailant’s finger shaking on the trigger: “Don't run or I'll shoot you,” he said. I was just 14 years old, and death was a stranger to me.
It was 1969, and Nigeria was embroiled in civil war. As a teenage refugee conscripted into the Biafran Army, I was forced at gunpoint to carry weapons to the Oguta front. It was a 24-hour, march through mosquito-infested mangroves flooded by the River Niger.
When the 30-month war ended on January 15, 1970, I was discharged and reunited with my parents. Together with one million returning refugees we walked for three days, avoiding landmines along fetid rainforest footpaths. Eventually, we reached our hometown of Onitsha. It was badly battered by the war.
There my thoughts returned to a love abandoned three years earlier—mathematical physics. This love affair blossomed when I was a refugee in Biafra, —shortly before July 20, 1969—the day man first walked on the moon. While running an errand, I stopped to gaze through a classroom window and saw a physics lecturer writing on a blackboard. It<
