TIME magazine called him
“the unsung hero behind the Internet.”
CNN called him “A Father of the Internet.”
President Bill Clinton called him
“one of the great minds of the Information
Age.”
He has been voted history’s greatest scientist
of African descent.
He is Philip Emeagwali.
He is coming to Trinidad and Tobago
to launch the 2008 Kwame Ture lecture series
on Sunday June 8
at the JFK [John F. Kennedy] auditorium
UWI [The University of the West Indies]
Saint Augustine 5 p.m.
The Emancipation Support Committee
invites you to come and hear this inspirational
mind
address the theme:
“Crossing New Frontiers
to Conquer Today’s Challenges.”
This lecture is one you cannot afford to miss.
Admission is free.
So be there on Sunday June 8
5 p.m.
at the JFK auditorium UWI St. Augustine.
[Wild applause and cheering for 22 seconds]
[I Was the Underdog of Supercomputing]
My first entry into the
unexplored territory
of massively parallel supercomputing
felt like a David versus Goliath battle.
I—Philip Emeagwali—was the David
and the proponent
of massively parallel processing supercomputers.
Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl
were the Goliaths
and the proponents
of scalar and vector processing supercomputers,
respectively.
The reason the likes of Seymour Cray
and Gene Amdahl
believed that it will be physically impossible
for me to massively parallel process
and do so across
an ensemble of 64 binary thousand
commodity-off-the-shelf processors
was because they were trained
for only six years.
Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl
were only trained
on how to sequentially compute
and compute
with only one processor.
The reason the pioneers of
sequential processing supercomputing
of the 1950s and ‘60s
and those of vector processing supercomputing
of the 1970s and ‘80s
argued that parallel processing
will forever remain a huge waste
of everybody’s time
was because they lacked
the sixteen years of mathematical maturity
that I acquired, onward of March 25, 1974.
My contributions to algebra, calculus,
and computational mathematics
was the cover story
of top mathematics publications
that are read by research mathematicians.
Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl
needed to fully understand
the parallel processing
supercomputer technology
and can only do so by, first, understanding
the extreme-scale computational science behind
the fastest supercomputing.
It’s impossible for Seymour Cray
or Gene Amdahl to understand
the most advanced expressions
in calculus—that is a subset
of massively parallel processing—without,
foremost,
having a decade and half
of specialized training on how to solve
initial-boundary value problems
that are governed by
a system of coupled, non-linear,
time-dependent, and state-of-the-art
partial differential equations
of modern calculus,
called Emeagwali’s Equations.
In an abstract lecture on advanced calculus
and extreme-scale algebra
that I delivered
on July 8, 1991, in Washington,
District of Columbia, United States,
I told mathematicians attending
the International Congress
of Industrial and Applied Mathematics,
the following:
“As a research mathematician
and as a research physicist,
I always knew the fact
that the scientific discoverer
discovered a truth,
whereas the inventor
of a partial differential equation
formulated possibilities.”
A computer scientist
that only trained with computers
that only used one processor
will not understand
the partial differential equations
and, therefore, will not understand
how to massively parallel process
and how to do so across
a new internet
that is a global network of
64 binary thousand
commodity-off-the-shelf processors.
So, my combined knowledge of physics, calculus,
algebra,
and massively parallel processing
was greater than the combined knowledge of
Seymour Cray and Gene Amdahl
that were only trained with computers
that used only one processor
that was not a member
of an ensemble of processors.
That gap in scientific knowledge
is evident by watching
and doing a side-by-side,
videotape-by-videotape
comparisons of the scientific lectures
of Seymour Cray,
Gene Amdahl, and myself,
Philip Emeagwali.
There was no shortcut
that could have enabled Seymour Cray or Gene
Amdahl
to understand in six years
what took me sixteen years to understand.
It’s as physically impossible
as a six-year old
fighting a sixteen-year-old Mohammed Ali
for the future world heavy weight
boxing championship.
Two thousand three hundred years ago,
a young prince asked Euclid
—the father of geometry—
for a short cut to geometry.
Euclid said to the young prince:
“There’s no royal road to geometry.”
[Wild applause and cheering for 17 seconds]
Insightful and brilliant lecture
