"Philip Emeagwali"(August 23,1954)

Is a Nigerian born-computer scientist/geologist who was one of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize,a prize from the IEEE for his uses of a Connection Machine supercomputer to help analyze petroleum fields.His early schooling's was suspended in 1967 due to the Nigerian-Biafran war.When Philip turned fourteen,he served in the Biafran army.After the war he completed a high school equivalency through self-study.Philip traveled to the United States to study under a scholarship after taking a correspondence course at the University of London.He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977.He worked as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming during this period.Philip later moved to Washington DC,receiving in 1986 a master's degree from George Washington University in ocean and marine engineering,and a second master's in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland.He received  a$1,000 1989 Gordon Bell Prize,based on an application of the CM-2 massive -parallel computer for oil-reservoir modeling.Philip won in the "price/performance"category,with a performance figure of 400 Mflops /$1M, Corresponding to an absolute performance of 3.1Gflops.The other recipient of the award,who won in the "peak performance"category of the CM-2for a similar application of the CM-2  to oil related seismic data processing,actually had a price-performance figure of 500 mflops/$1M an abosolute performance of 6.0 Gflops,but the judges decided not award both prizes to the same team.William was the first program to apply a pseudo-time apporach to reservoir modeling.