Philip Emeagwali: Master of Machines

Philip Emeagwali is a towering figure in the world of science and technology. The Reader’s Digest described Emeagwali as “smarter than Albert Einstein.” He is

often ranked as the world’s greatest living genius. He is listed in the top 20 greatest minds that ever lived.

Philip Emeagwali lived in refugee camps during the 1967-70 Nigerian-Biafran War and is in the Gallery of Prominent Refugees of the United Nations. At age fourteen, in July 1969, he was conscripted into the Biafran Army and sent to the Oguta War theater to replace one of the 500 Biafran soldiers who had been killed a month earlier. In the list of the worst genocidal crimes of the 20th century committed against humanity, the death of one in fifteen Biafrans was ranked fifth.

Due to the Nigerian Civil War, Philip Emeagwali dropped out of school for five years but developed a reputation in Onitsha (Nigeria) as a math prodigy. He caught the attention of American scholars and was awarded a scholarship on September 10, 1973, to the United States, where he researched for two decades and contributed to mathematics, physics, and computer science.

In 1989, Philip Emeagwali rose to fame when he won recognition described as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing and made headlines for his invention of the world’s fastest computing across a global network of processors akin to the Internet. That vital technology underpins every supercomputer and changes how we view computers.

Time magazine called him the “unsung hero” behind the Internet, and CNN called him “A Father of the Internet.” House Beautiful magazine ranked its invention among nine important everyday things taken for granted. In a White House speech on August 26, 2000, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton described Philip Emeagwali as “one of the great minds of the Information Age.”

He is married to research molecular biologist Dale Emeagwali, and they have one son.