Phillip Emeagwali Biography & Net Worth

Philip Emeagwali is a Nigerian inventor and scientist, he is said to be one of the 24 smartest people who ever lived. He is reported with an IQ of 190, and was voted the “greatest African scientist of all time”. His net worth is estimated at $1-5 million.

Who is Philip Emeagwali?

In this article, RNN will highlight Philip Emeagwali’s biography and net worth.

Biodata

Biography

Philip Emeagwali, born on August 23 1954, was born in Akure but was raised in Onitsha in the South Eastern part of Nigeria. He was the oldest in a family of nine children, his family and neighbours considered him a prodigy because of his skills as a math student. His father spent a significant amount of time nurturing his son’s education.

Emeagwali reached high school, and his facility with numbers had earned him the nickname “Calculus”, fifteen months after Emeagwali’s high school education began, the Nigerian Civil War erupted, and his family were part of the Nigerian Igbo tribes that fled to the eastern part of the country.

He found himself drafted into the army of the seceding state of Biafra. Emeagwali’s family lived in a refugee camp until the war ended in 1970. More than half a million Biafrans died of starvation during the Nigerian Civil War. he completed high-school equivalence through self-study.

After the war ended, Emeagwali doggedly continued to pursue his education, he attended school in Onitsha, Nigeria, and walked two hours to and from school each day. Unfortunately, he had to drop out due to financial problems. After continuing to study, he passed a high school equivalency exam administered by the University of London in 1973. The education efforts paid off when Emeagwali earned a scholarship to attend college in the U.S.

High School Education

Emeagwali travelled to the U.S. in 1974 to attend Oregon State University. Upon arrival, in the course of one week, he used a telephone, visited a library, and saw a computer for the first time, he then earned his degree in mathematics in 1977. Later, he attended George Washington University to earn a Master of Ocean and Marine Engineering. He also holds a second master’s degree from the University of Maryland in applied mathematics.

While attending the University of Michigan on a doctoral fellowship in the 1980s, Emeagwali began work on a project to use computers to help identify untapped underground oil reservoirs. He grew up in Nigeria, an oil-rich country and he understood computers and how to drill for oil. Conflict over control of oil production was one of the critical causes of the Nigerian Civil War.

Computing Achievement

Initially, Emeagwali worked on the oil discovery problem using a supercomputer. However, he decided it was more efficient to use thousands of widely distributed microprocessors to do his calculations instead of tying up eight expensive supercomputers. He discovered an unused computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory formerly used to simulate nuclear explosions. It was dubbed the Connection Machine.

Emeagwali began hooking up over 60,000 microprocessors. Ultimately, the Connection Machine, programmed remotely from Emeagwali’s apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ran more than 3.1 billion calculations per second and correctly identified the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir. The computing speed was faster than that achieved by a Cray supercomputer.

Awards

• Price/performance–Gordon Bell Prize-1989
• New African “35th-greatest African (and greatest African scientist) of all time”

Selected Publications

• Emeagwali, P. How do we reverse the brain drain-2003
• Emeagwali, P. Can Nigeria leapfrog into the information age-1997

Phillip’s Net Worth

Philip Emeagwali’s net worth is estimated at $1-5 million, he made his fortune from being a computer scientist.