Philip Emeagwali (born 1954) is a Nigerian-born computer scientist who was one of five 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 USD 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 recognition as one of "Essence magazine's ten most beautiful men".

Emeagwali heavily promotes himself as a speaker for conferences. A large number of websites [1] [2] named after famous inventors and other great achievers, particularly African ones, have been created to promote Emeagwali. They feature brief biographies of them (copied verbatim from sources such as Project Gutenberg public domain texts and the World Book Encyclopedia), surrounded by many links to Emeagwali's site. The large number of links to Emeagwali's main site also boosts the prominence of it in search engines. The relevant domain name whoisWhois is a protocol for submitting a query to a database for determining the owner of a domain name, an IP network, or an autonomous system number. For instance a whois query on wikipedia. org results in the following: Domain ID:D51687756-LROR Domain Name records list Donita Brown, Emeagwali's wife, as the technical and administrative contact.
1 Court case

Emeagwali studied for a PhD degree from the University of MichiganThe University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a public coeducational university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is the oldest and main campus of the University of Michigan, which also includes branches University of Michigan-Dearborn and University of Michi from 1987 through 1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external examiners and was thus 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.
2 Emeagwali's popular media claims

Emeagwali, on his website, claims that the Gordon Bell prize has been called "supercomputing's Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Prizes (pronounced no-BELL or no-bell are awarded annually to people who have done outstanding research, invented groundbreaking techniques or equipment, or made outstanding contributions to society. It is generally regarded as the supreme comme". 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 AwardTuring Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer f is regarded as by far the most prestigious award.

Emeagwali, cites CNN as describing him as "a father of the InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu", a claim that has been widely repeated in the popular press. This claim has not been paid much attention in the computer science and Internet communities. 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.

Supercomputers, and parallel processing, predate Emeagwali's work by decades. ENIACENIAC short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was the first all-electronic computer designed to be Turing-complete, capable of being reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems. It was preceded in 1941 by the fully, arguably the first general-purpose digital computer, featured some level of parallel processing. The first supercomputers described as such were probably those developed by a team led by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation. The Connection Machine hardware itself was developed by a team at Thinking Machines by a team featuring a number of well-known computer scientists, at least partly based on founder Danny Hillis's doctoral work. The machines were used for a number of purposes well before Emeagwali's contribution.

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 improvments 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. Supercomputing researchers often made use of the internet as a way of remotely accessing machines; this is one of many applications of the Internet.

Emeagwali has not had any articles published in any 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 state that he holds patents, for instance an article at the Lemelson-MIT inventor program [3], states 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]. This is false; 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 used to perform computations far faster and more cost-effectively than Emeagwali as the inevitable result of Moore's Law and improvement in programming techniques.