August 23

Philip Emeagwali, Builder of the World's Fastest Computer

On this day in 1954, Philip Emeagwali was born in western Nigeria. Known to some as the "Bill Gates of Africa" and to others simply as "Calculus," Emeagwali is an exceptional mathematician and computer scientist. Among Emeagwali's achievements is the world's fastest computation speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second.

Emeagwali got his idea from nature. He watched bees build their honeycombs. Few creatures work more efficiently than bees, thought Emeagwali, so why not program a computer to use thousands of other computers (like the bees) to work? In 1989 his computer became the fastest computer on Earth.