Tech's Day 27 in Black History: Philip Emeagwali the Bill Gates of Africa

Emeagwali far right

Philip Emeagwali the Bill Gates of Africa.  You heard right, he was born in Nigeria in 1954 where like many African school children he was forced to drop out of school because his father could no longer afford the fees to send him, but his father continued to teach him at home until his son knew more than him.

He went to college in America to get his BS degree in mathematics from Oregon State University. a PH.D in Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan and two Masters degrees from George Washington University.

In 1989, The Bill Gates of Africa invented the worlds's fastest computer which could perform computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second! Now get this, he developed this computer by studying bees, yes bees!  He saw and studied how bees construct and work with honey combs finding how efficient it was he emulated their construction of a honey comb and used 65,000 processors to create the worlds fastest computer!  Ha, who knew Bees were computer scientist!  A process that he believes this will allow for weather forecasting far into the future and for simulated global warming trends to help address the issues.

In fact this process of using a large number of computers to be able to communicate at once is what helped birth the internet!  That's right you wouldn't even be reading this blog if it wasn't for Emeagwali. Oh and not only is he considered one of the father's of the internet, but he had the first personal website emeagwali.com.


 He has been living in American for many years and on this day February 27 in 1989 he won the Gordon Bell Prize (Computing's Nobel Prize) for solving one of the twenty most difficult problems in the computing field which basically was  the simulation and recovery of oil and gas from underground reservoirs.

He is voted the 35th greatest African in History. He is the most searched for modern scientist on the internet.

SHORT BIO from emeagwali.com
Philip Emeagwali helped give birth to the supercomputer,
the technology that gave birth to the Internet. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, which has been called “supercomputing's Nobel Prize" and CNN described him as “one of the fathers of the Internet.” Bill Clinton extolled him as “one of the great minds of the Information Age” and the readers of New African magazine voted him as history's 35th greatest person of African descent.