The hardships that I encountered in the past will help me succeed in the future.
Philip Emeagwali
The Connection Machine was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is a complex supercomputer and it will take forever to completely describe how it works.
Because I am not formally trained in the medical sciences, I can bring in new ideas to AIDS research and the cross-fertilization of ideas from different fields could be a valuable contribution to finding the cure for AIDS.
I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.
My focus is not on solving nature's deeper mysteries. It is on using nature's deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems.
During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.
Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.
Eighty percent of Americans with HIV do not know they are infected.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
The labs were happy that I was brave enough to attempt to program it and the $5 million computer was left entirely to my use. I was their human guinea pig.
It is smarter to borrow from nature than to reinvent the wheels.
The greatest grand challenge for any scientist is discovering how to prevent the spread of HIV and finding the cure or an effective vaccine for AIDS.
First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.
One out of every 100 American men is HIV positive. The rate of infection has reached epidemic proportions in 40 developing nations.
Due to financial reasons, I dropped out of school after eight years of formal schooling.
The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.
I dropped out of high school four times between the ages of 12 to 17.
When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.
I preferred to study those subjects that were of interest to me.
The 65,536 processors were inside the Connection Machine.
The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.
Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.
Because I believe that humans are computers, I conjectured that computers, like people, can have left- and right-handed versions.
Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted.
