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Dr.
Philip Emeagwali
Developer of the World's Fastest Computer |
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His
brilliant and far-reaching
discoveries have changed our lives. |
| Dr.
Philip Emeagwali developed the world's fastest computer,
invented hyperball computer networks, invented a new approach for
designing supercomputers by observing and emulating patterns in nature,
formulated new mathematical (partial differential) equations for slowly
moving liquids and gases such as the flow within the Earth's interior,
and is
regarded as one of the world's most astute scientific brains.
In 1989 he won the coveted Gordon Bell Prize for his work with massively parallel computers, after programming the Connection Machine to compute a world record 3.1 billion calculations per second using 65,536 processors—via the Internet—to simulate oil reservoirs. In 1990 he solved the largest weather forecasting equations with 128 million points. Dr. Emeagwali solved one of America's 20 Grand Challenges—accurately computing how oil flows underground and thereby showing the petroleum industry that massively parallel computers can be used to recover more oil. The Nigerian born mathematician describes his research approach as multidisciplinary, unorthodox, intuitive and nature-inspired. "I am a mathematician who relies heavily on qualitative problem solving techniques." Dr. Emeagwali believes that the greatest grand challenge for any scientist is discovering how to prevent the spread of HIV and finding the cure or an effective vaccine for AIDS. One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations. Worldwide, 23 million people are infected with the HIV virus. "Because I am not formally trained in the medical sciences, I can bring in new ideas to AIDS research, and the cross-fertilization of ideas from different fields could be a valuable contribution to finding the cure for AIDS. It could be easier for me to develop an AIDS vaccine than to solve the next grand challenge in computer science." |
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©
dwij
2002 |