Genius of Our Age
interviewed by The Guardian


Distinction could well be Philip Emeagwali's middle name. A high school drop-out and former war refugee, this US based Nigerian is today the wonder boy of supercomputing. He has been called the "Bill Gates of Africa." His earlier schoolmates at Christ the King College, Onitsha, remember him as "Calculus." Emeagwali holds several records: the world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second; world record for solving the largest partial differential equations with 8 million grid points; world record for solving the largest weather forecasting equations with 128 million grid points; world record for an unprecedented parallel computer speedup; discovered the counter-intuitive hypercube paradox; formulated the theory of tessellated models for parallel computing; discovered chirality, duality, helicity, etc. The remaining achievements run into eight more pages. Emeagwali has been honored with all the top awards in his field, but he says the world hasn't seen anything yet. Over a period of seven months, The Guardian's Reuben Abati, currently in the United States, interviewed Emeagwali, one topic at a time, on a variety of issues.


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     Read the transcripts:


Nigerian Childhood

Emigrating to US

Education

Influences on Work

African Mathematics

Africa ONE

Hobbies

Motivation

Crazy Scientists

Nature Influence

Discoveries

Borrowing from Nature

Telepresence

Computers in Africa

Fastest Computer

Intuition & Invention

Steve Jobs

Bill Gates

Artificial Intelligence

Deep Blue

Famine & War

Telepresence

Racism in Science

Nigerians in America

Brain Drain

Information Revolution

Cyber Wars

Animism & Mysticism

Internet Phone

Nigerians

Public Service

Nigerian Problem




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