Black African American Inventors
patrici...@hotmail.com
patrici...@hotmail.com wrote:
>
>
> In article <770ci9$5...@news1.snet.net>,
> "mitchell miller" <mmi...@torringtonsupply.com> wrote:
> > My son who is in the 4th grade needs to prepare a report 50
inventions and
> > their inventors who have done the most to change the world.
> > Anyone who has any ideas on where to get this information and is
willing to
> > share it with us please let us know.
> > My son and I thank you!
> > mmi...@torringtonsupply.com
> >
> >
>
> Here is an article from UPSCALE magazine on inventors.
>
> Enjoy,
> Patricia Turner
>
> We know of the famous
> African-American inventors of the past,
> Lewis H. Latimer who provided the
> filament that made Thomas Edison's light
> bulb burn so brightly; George
> Washington Carver, who developed
> peanut butter and countless other
> inventions from the peanut; and Garrett
> Morgan, who invented the first
> automated stoplight and gas mask. But,
> what about the inventors of today? We
> searched the country to find those special
> African-Americans whose creativity and
> ingenuity have, in one way or another,
> shaped our lives.
>
> Dr. Philip Emeagwali
>
> http://emeagwali.com
> Research Scientist
> Saint Paul, Minnesota
>
> Who developed the fastest computer on
> earth? Dr. Philip Emeagwali, an
> interdisciplinary computer
> scientist/inventor, used 65,000 processors
> to perform the world's fastest
> computation of 3.1 billion calculations
> per second. His design was inspired by
> the complex geometries of nature. From
> geometrical theories, Emeagwali proved
> that bees use the most efficient method
> to construct their honeycombs, so a
> computer which emulated the
> honeycomb will be efficient and
> powerful. Emeagwali's computers are
> currently being used to forecast the
> weather and predict future global
> warming.
Visit http://emeagwali.com for additional information
Visit http://emeagwali.com or use the following keywords in the major
search
engines to learn more about:
black inventors
black history month
african american scientists
american scientists
black history
black inventions
african-american scientists
black british scientists and inventors
black history inventions
black inventions
african-american scientists
inventors
black inventors
black inventors and inventions
black inventors and their inventions
african american scientist
black american inventions
black scientist and inventors
african-american scientists
black inventions
famous black american scientists
first african american inventions
notable black scientist
inventions by african-americans
famous black inventors
inventions by black americans
famous african american scientist
african-american electricity inventors
black inventor
black history inventors
Here is another article posted at http://emeagwali.com that will be of
interest to you.
Title: FAMOUS SCIENTIST HAILS FROM IGBO LAND
In this day and age when Japanese, Chinese or anyone remotely
resembling Asian descent is automatically presumed to hold superior
mathematical and technological aptitude, Dr. Emeagwali poses a
refreshing reminder (1) to the world that intellectual gifts come in
all races, creeds and colors; and (2) to Igbos that when we strive for
excellence, there is no limit to what we can achieve ... so strive for
excellence!
(PHOTO CAPTION: Dr. Philip Emeagwali, World
Renowned Computer Scientist.)
So who is Philip Emeagwali, and what has he done that has made him
so famous? Emeagwali first entered the international limelight in 1989
when he received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for performing the
world's fastest calculation at 3.1 billion calculations per second.
This calculation was remarkable not only because it was twice as fast
as the previous world record, but also because of the method used to
achieve this phenomenal task. Rather than use a multimillion dollar
supercomputer, Emeagwali used the Internet to access 65,536 small
computers simultaneously (called massively parallel computers).
Unity is indeed strength as demonstrated by Emeagwali's approach.
This technology is revolutionizing the oil industry as it is used to
help simulate how to recover oil from oilfields, thus helping oil
producing nations to efficiently extract more oil and increase their
oil revenues. It is also applicable to the field of meteorology as it
can be used to help predict weather patterns for the next 100 years
forecast.
Since this invention, Emeagwali has made numerous other achievements
and received dozens of honors and awards across the globe in the field
of mathematics, science and computers.
Isn't it just like an Igbo, to use existing resources and push them
to their fullest potential to achieve unsurpassed results that would
revolutionize several major industries at once. Remember Emmanuel
Egbujo, inventor of the solar powered car or Damien Anyanwu who
invented Radio Mbaise from Igbo traditional methods? Remember during
the Nigeria Biafra War when Emeagwali was a mere refugee, his kinsfolk
developed the "Ogbunigwe" bomb (popularly called the Ojukwu bucket)
which dazzled the world of super powers. They also developed a self-
sufficient petroleum refining method which Nigeria is yet to discover.
Ndi Igbo lay claim to Emeagwali's achievements not to subtract from
their magnanimity, but to remind our Igbo brothers and sisters that we
have a tradition of competitiveness and excellence. However, like many
of Nigeria's untapped resources this type of genius lies grossly
underdeveloped in millions of Nigerian children and even in ourselves.
Some of Emeagwali's inventions are so complex, that only the most
sophisticated computer scientist and mathematicians can understand
them. However, the creation of Emeagwali himself is a simple story.
Emeagwali was born to Onitsha parents, his father being a nurse and
mother a housewife. As a child, his father focused on the development
of his son's mathematical skills and required him on a daily basis to
solve 100 math problems in one hour. This method helped to develop
Emeagwali into a mathematical wizard as his abilities soon surpassed
his father's. Although showing great promise, Emeagwali's education
threatened to derail when he was forced to drop out of school at the
age 14 because his father was unable to pay his school fees. However,
Emeagwali continued to study and eventually received a scholarship to
Oregon State University in the USA where he earned a B.S.
Subsequently, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, two
Masters Degrees from George Washington University and a third Masters
Degree from the University of Maryland. Isn't it just like an Igbo to
overcome such odds only to excel and excel and excel?
And to top it all off, Emeagwali is married to an accomplished
scientist in her own right. Dr. Dale Brown Emeagwali, renowned
microbiologist was named 1996 Scientist of the Year by the National
Technical Association. The Emeagwali's have one child.
Dr. Philip Emeagwali is truly an international treasure, and IGBO
BASICS looks forward to his appearance at the World Igbo Congress
Conference in New York. In the meantime, we can all learn more about
Dr. Emeagwali on the Internet at http://emeagwali.com.
SIDEBAR: Dr. Philip Emeagwali's Recent Awards
and Honors
1997
Nigeria Prize
the Federal Republic of Nigeria
1996
Nigerian Achievement Award
1996
America's Best and Brightest
1993
Computer Scientist of the Year
1991
Distinguished Scientist Award
National Society of Black Engineers
1991
Scientist of the Year
National Society of Black Engineers
1989
Gordon Bell Prize
IEEE Computer Society
SIDEBAR: Dr. Philip Emeagwali's Outstanding
Achievements
1990
World record for solving the largest weather
forecasting equations
with 128 million grid points.
1990
World record for an unprecedented parallel
computer speed up of
65536
1989 World's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per
second
1989
World record for solving the largest partial
differential equations with 8
million grid points
1989
First successful implementation of a petroleum
reservoir model on a
massively parallel computer
1991
Distinguished Scientist Award
National Society of Black Engineers
1991
Scientist of the Year
National Society of Black Engineers
1989
Gordon Bell Prize
IEEE Computer Society
Visit http://emeagwali.com for more information.
Original article published in the July 1997 issue of IGBO BASICS.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
patrici...@hotmail.com
> > In article <770ci9$5...@news1.snet.net>,
> > "mitchell miller" wrote:
> > > My son who is in the 4th grade needs to prepare a report 50
> inventions and
> > > their inventors who have done the most to change the world.
> > > Anyone who has any ideas on where to get this information and is
> willing to
> > > share it with us please let us know.
> > > My son and I thank you!
> > > > >
> > >
ONE OF THE WORLD's FASTEST HUMANS
(Published in the February 1991 issue of Michigan Today, an quarterly
publication of the University of Michigan mailed to 400,000 alumni.)
Faster supercomputers are needed to solve important
scientific and engineering problems. Computing twice
as fast would be impressive; ten times faster would
be
even more impressive.
Philip Emeagwali, a doctoral candidate in scientific
computing in the College of Engineering and the 1989
recipient of the Gordon Bell Prize for his
supercomputing research, has increased the speed of a
massively parallel supercomputer to as much as 1,000
times faster than a mainframe computer and 1,000,000
times faster than a personal computer.
Almost as impressive as its speed of operation is the
massively parallel computer's thrift. It costs only
about
one-fiftieth of the money to perform computations on
a
massively parallel computer as on a conventional
supercomputer.
"The supercomputer industry and much of the
academic establishment have claimed that massively
parallel computers were suited only for certain
types of
problems," Emeagwali says. "But in the past few
months, reports at scientific gatherings and in the
news
media have indicated that some investigators using
the
Connection Machine--- the largest massively parallel
supercomputer now available ---- have proved the
establishment wrong."
Emeagwali had already been looking at
computation-intensive problems from a theoretical
standpoint. When he learned of a $1,000 prize offered
by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers
Computer Society for the fastest computation in a
scientific and engineering problem requiring
trillions of
calculations, he decided to compete.
Emeagwali studied the U.S. government's list of the
20
most computationally difficult problems. The one that
interested him most involved calculating oil. Even
before the onset of war in the Persian Gulf, American
experts recognized the importance of improving the
efficiency of oil extraction.
"The oil industry purchases 10 percent of all
supercomputers and is keenly aware of the difficulty
of
computing oil-field flow," Emeagwali says. Oil has
properties that make calculating its flow patterns
within
an oil field more difficult than modeling the flow of
groundwater. To model oil-field flow in a computer
requires the simulation of the distribution of the
oil at
tens of thousands of locations throughout the far-
flung
field. At each location, the computer must be
programmed to make hundreds of simultaneous
calculations at regular intervals of time to
determine
such variables as temperature, direction of oil flow,
viscosity, pressure and several geological
properties of
the basin holding the oil.
"Even a supercomputer working at the rate of millions
of calculations a second is far too slow to reach a
result
that can be acted on in a timely fashion," Emeagwali
explains. "The oil companies need the results quickly
enough to decide how to recover the maximum amount
of oil."
Since an average of only 30 percent of oil is
recovered
in an oil field, Emeagwali notes, "It's easy to
understand why the industry is keenly interested in
more accurate simulations of oil flow. An improvement
to even a 31 percent recovery rate --- just one
percentage point --- translates into billions of
dollars of
savings."
Emeagwali attracted the attention of many industries
and investigators when he won the Gordon Bell Prize
by showing how he used a $6 million massively
parallel
computer to perform the trillions of oil field-
modeling
computations at three times the speed of the
mightiest
$30 million supercomputer. He hit a computational
speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second.
How did he do it? It took some creative mathematical
thinking for Emeagwali, who was renowned for
mathematical prowess even as a child in Nigeria, to
hit
upon a `new' technique that resurrected some
equations that had grown dusty in the computing field
for 50 years.
Rather than use the equations that have been used
throughout the century to calculate oil-field flow
and
similar phenomena, Emeagwali asked himself, "When
did we start using these equations, and why did we
start using them?"
He researched those equations and learned that in the
late 19th century "a type of partial differential
equation
similar to the classical `heat equation' was derived
to
perform the kinds of calculations required to
describe
oil-field flow."
Emeagwali with the Connection Machine in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Massively parallel computers are a
young
technology. Only a few universities have acquired
their own
models. The U-M is now considering venturing into
this
field, Emeagwali says. (Photo by Jon Chomitz for
Thinking Machine Corp.)
There are three families of partial differential
equations
--- elliptical, parabolic and hyperbolic. The
equations
usually used to simulate and oil reservoir fall into
the
parabolic category. Oil reservoir equations take into
account three of the four major forces affecting
flow:
pressure, gravitation and viscosity (or drag). They
ignore the fourth force --- inertia (or
acceleration).
In 1938 a Soviet mathematician, B. K. Risenkampf,
derived a set of partial differential equations that
included the fourth force. The Risenkampf equations
belong to the hyperbolic category.
Until the invention of the massively parallel
computer,
it made no sense to try to apply Risenkampf's
equations to problems like oil-field flow; it would
have
taken too many computations for existing computing
technology --- from calculating machines to
supercomputers.
"The fourth, or inertial, force affecting the slow
flow of
oil in the ground is about 10,000 times smaller than
the
three other forces," Emeagwali explains, "so
neglecting
inertia didn`t result in much error even though the
solutions still resembled those of the parabolic
equations,
"If I put 10,000 dollar bills on the table in ones
and you
take a dollar, I'm not likely to detect and report
the
crime. In the same way, it was reasonable to ignore
the
inertial force back then."
Emeagwali had become
interested in the Risenkampf
equations while working at
the National Weather
Service, and decided to take
a "top-down approach" by
seeing if the hyperbolic
equations would result in a
better model of the oil-field
flow.
"I knew that hyperbolic
equations result in solutions
that more accurately reflect
the real world," Emeagwali
says, and so he expected
them to yield a better
representation of the real
properties of oil-field flow.
Even though they are more complex, Emeagwali
theorized, hyperbolic equations would open "a shorter
and quicker path" to the solution of modeling flow.
And in terms of his academic goals, using hyperbolic
equations on a massively parallel computer would show
that "calculations that could take months, even
years,
to perform on a personal computer could be done in
seconds or minutes.
"If we had massively parallel computers a hundred
years ago," Emeagwali continues, "we would have used
hyperbolic equations instead of parabolic. The serial
computer hardware we have today reflects the absence
of a need to go the hyperbolic route. But once you
have a certain kind of hardware, it reinforces the
methods you`ve used. It`s not that anyone is to blame
for it, but in a sense computers have developed down
a
blind alley."
In the future, Emeagwali says --- and the very near
future at that --- the architecture of massively
parallel
computers like the Connection Machine will trickle
down to the personal computer level. They will
increase realism in what computer buffs call
artificial
reality (AR).
More important for civilization will be the impart of
massive parallelism at the supercomputer level.
Emeagwali expects to see quite soon "automakers using
these computers to fully simulate car crashes on the
computer rather than crashing expensive rigged-out
models at up to $750,000 a test."
In medicine, "Investigators will find that using
computers based on the technology of massive
parallelism will permit them to study human diseases
by studying humans without compromising human
health, instead of using mice, chimpanzees and the
like."
"Any way you look at it, " Emeagwali concludes, "the
computer industry will have no choice. They will have
to switch to massive parallelism."
Emeagwali hopes to give the industry a big nudge in
early 1991 if his latest submission for the
international
computing contest is as convincing as last year's.
"I'm trying to prove that we know how to reach the
Holy Grail of computing --- computing at the
teraflops
level by performing trillions of calculations in a
second"
[see main article].
Emeagwali says massively parallel supercomputers are
approximately five times faster than conventional
machines now, but he forecasts that the advantage
will
approach 100-to-1 in 10 years. If he's right, you can
expect radical changes in the computer industry very
soon.
patrici...@hotmail.com
> > In article <770ci9$5...@news1.snet.net>,
> > "mitchell miller" wrote:
> > > My son who is in the 4th grade needs to prepare a report 50
> inventions and
> > > their inventors who have done the most to change the world.
> > > Anyone who has any ideas on where to get this information and is
> willing to
> > > share it with us please let us know.
> > > My son and I thank you!
> > > > >
> > >
ONE OF THE WORLD's FASTEST HUMANS
(Published in the February 1991 issue of Michigan Today, an quarterly
publication of the University of Michigan mailed to 400,000 alumni.)
Faster supercomputers are needed to solve important
scientific and engineering problems. Computing twice
as fast would be impressive; ten times faster would
be
even more impressive.
Philip Emeagwali, a doctoral candidate in scientific
computing in the College of Engineering and the 1989
recipient of the Gordon Bell Prize for his
supercomputing research, has increased the speed of a
massively parallel supercomputer to as much as 1,000
times faster than a mainframe computer and 1,000,000
times faster than a personal computer.
Almost as impressive as its speed of operation is the
massively parallel computer's thrift. It costs only
about
one-fiftieth of the money to perform computations on
a
patrici...@hotmail.com
patrici...@hotmail.com
> > > "mitchell miller" wrote:
> > > > My son who is in the 4th grade needs to prepare a report 50
> > inventions and
> > > > their inventors who have done the most to change the world.
> > > > Anyone who has any ideas on where to get this information and is
> > willing to
> > > > share it with us please let us know.
> > > > My son and I thank you!
> > > > > >
> > > >
> > >> Visit http://emeagwali.com or use the following keywords in the
> major
> > search
> > engines to learn more about:
> >
> > black inventors
patrici...@hotmail.com
> > > "mitchell miller" wrote:
> > > > My son who is in the 4th grade needs to prepare a report 50
> > inventions and
> > > > their inventors who have done the most to change the world.
> > > > Anyone who has any ideas on where to get this information and is
> > willing to
> > > > share it with us please let us know.
> > > > My son and I thank you!
> > > > > >
> > > >
> > >> Visit http://emeagwali.com or use the following keywords in the
> major
> > search
> > engines to learn more about:
> >
> > black inventors