Dr. Emeagwali nventor fastest computer

Born in Nigeria, Philip Emeagwali dropped out of school at age 14 because his father could no longer afford to pay his school fees. He was home-schooled by his father using mental exercises to solve 100 math problems in one hour. As one of the most famous African-American inventors of the 20th century, Dr. Emeagwali has won the Gordon Bell Prize as well as the Nobel Prize for computation. His computers are currently being used to forecast the weather and to predict the likelihood and effects of future global warming.

The noted black inventor received acclaim based, at least in part, on his study of nature, specifically bees. Emeagwali saw an inherent efficiency in the way bees construct and work with honeycomb. He determined that he could emulate this process with computers to be the most efficient and powerful. In 1989, emulating the bees’ honeycomb construction, Emeagwali used 65,000 processors to invent the world’s fastest computer, which performs computations at 3.1 billion calculations per second.