Wonders They Say May Never End.
With All The Hype About Philip Emeagwali being the Father of The Internet, How Many of Us Have Had The Time To Research on His "Claims".
Do U Know He Was Never Awarded a Phd? Hes Thesis at the University of Michigan Was Never Approved by the Board. Its Still an Issue at the Courts.
May Be This Article From Wikipedia May Be A Start. Check It Out!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip-EmeagwaliPhilip Emeagwali
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Philip Emeagwali (born 1954) is a Nigerian-born computer scientist/geologist 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 analyse petroleum fields. He received $1000 US for this award.
He is often featured in the popular press as a prominent African-American or Nigerian scientist, and claims on his website to be the "World's Most Searched-For Scientist", "Second Most Searched-For Nigerian", and "Eighth Most Searched-For African". He has received numerous other awards, ranging from one from the World Bank-IMF Africa Club to being voted the "35th-greatest African of all time" in a survey by New African magazine. His achievements were quoted in a speech by Bill Clinton as an example of what Nigerians could achieve when given the opportunity [1].
In the 1990s, Emeagwali was a visiting lecturer at several computer science departments. He now describes his work as a "public intellectual."
Emeagwali is also a public speaker. A large number of websites [2] [3] named after famous inventors and other great achievers, particularly African ones, promote him, featuring brief biographies of them (copied verbatim from sources such as Project Gutenberg public domain texts and the World Book Encyclopedia), accompanied by links to Emeagwali's website. The large number of links to Emeagwali's main site also boosts the prominence of it in search engines. As of February 2005, the relevant domain name whois records list the same person, Iya Nma Cheka, as the technical contact for these sites. Previously, Donita Brown, listed as one of the two contacts on Emeagwali's own site, was listed as the technical contact.
According to his website, Emeagwali was born in a remote Nigerian village in 1954. He dropped out of school in 1967 because of the Nigerian civil war. When he turned fourteen, he was conscripted into the Biafran army. After the end of the war, He completed a high-school equivalency through self-study and came to the United States to study at university under a scholarship. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977. He received a master's degree in environmental engineering from George Washington University in 1981, and another master's degree in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986. He also received a post-master's degree in ocean, coastal and marine engineering from George Washington University in that year. He was also working as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming during this period.
Contents [hide]
1 Court case
2 Emeagwali's popular media claims
3 See also
4 External links
[edit] Court case
Emeagwali studied for a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan from 1987 through 1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and thus he was not awarded the degree. Emeagwali filed a court challenge, claiming that the decision was a violation of his civil rights and that the university had discriminated against him in several ways because of his race. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan state Court of Appeals.
[edit] Emeagwali's popular media claims
Emeagwali, on his website, claims that the Gordon Bell prize has been called "supercomputing's Nobel Prize". While it is a significant prize in the relatively narrow field of supercomputing, it is not in any way comparable in financial rewards, prestige, or recognition to the Nobel Prizes. In the wider field of computing, the Turing Award is regarded as by far the most prestigious award.
Some media reports are unclear as to the nature of Emeagwali's work for which he received the Gorden Bell Prize. Emeagwali used an existing supercomputer, the Connection Machine, in a more efficient manner for analysing petroleum fields. Emeagwali was not associated with this machine's development. Others were using this machine and its parallel processing capabilities for a number of purposes, including the other team that won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989.
Emeagwali, cites CNN as describing him as "a father of the Internet." Emeagwali bases his claim on the notion that "the Supercomputer is the father of the internet", in that both a supercomputer and the Internet can be viewed as an interconnected network of processing units working cooperatively. This is in contrast to the "father of the Internet" usually acknowledged by the computing community, Vint Cerf.
Although supercomputing researchers often made use of the Internet as a way of remotely accessing machines, that is only one of many possible applications of the Internet. The Internet was born out of an interest in connecting disparate computer networks and has been used for a large number of purposes. Many different technologies from the 1960s and 1970s, including packet switching and local area networks, contributed to its development. It is generally agreed that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were key figures behind the early development of the protocols used by the Internet, but a huge number of other people contributed to improvements to this basic technology, implementing it on a wide variety of computers and making this implementation widely available, and developing the services that use the infrastructure of the internet (such as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web). Most of this work occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Emeagwali has not provided any evidence of involvement with any of this work.
Also, much of the development of Internet technical standards has taken place in the circulation of Request for Comments memoranda. Emeagwali has not authored a single Request for Comments memorandum, nor is he mentioned in any of the 4,000 already in existence, even though anyone may submit a RFC for publication after meeting the minimal formatting and structural requirements.
Emeagwali has not had any articles published in any of the dozens of journals or conferences published by the IEEE or the Association for Computing Machinery, the two largest and most prestigious bodies in the field of computing.
Some web sites have stated that he holds patents, for instance an article at the Lemelson-MIT inventor program (archive copy, since deleted), claimed that he "holds more than 30 patents". He is not listed in the USPTO patent database, which holds fully searchable records of all US patents dating back to 1976, nor in its pending application database, as of April 2004.
Emeagwali also claims to have performed the "world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989" [4]. In reality, Emeagwali's Gordon Bell Prize was awarded for the best price/performance ratio; the winning entry in the absolute performance category performed almost double the number of calculations. The winning entry in the performance category also had a superior price/performance ratio to Emeagwali's solution; the judges decided to award only one prize to each entry and as the second-best entry Emeagwali received the price/performance prize [5]. In subsequent years, various supercomputers have been developed which perform computations far faster and cheaper as the inevitable result of Moore's Law and improvement in programming techniques.
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or China with their Large Base of Whiz Kids etc.
