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He has won it all and has been appropriately labelled the "whizkid". He is not new to international honours and awards. They have come in various sizes and shapes, bringing in their wake, new frontiers in knowledge. Former United States President, Bill Clinton, himself, a phenomenal achiever, called him "Father of the Internet". Time magazine, an influential US based weekly, dubbed him "Super Brain".

Mathematician and engineer, Philip Emeagwali has been called "a father of the Internet" for his advanced formulas that in 1988 enabled more than 65,000 networked processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second, a record-breaking achievement that rejuvenated the world of super computing.

From a Nigerian parentage of little means, Emeagwali was largely self-taught, earning his first diploma from the University of London in 1973. The self-determined achiever has not looked back since then. During the 1970s and '80s, he furthered his education at Oregon State University, George Washington University and the University of Maryland, studying mathematics and environmental engineering. With his formulas for networked processors, he solved one of the most difficult problems in computing, and he also applied mathematics to the problems of calculating oil reserves.

Emeagwali has won numerous awards and is considered one of the greatest scientists in the world. The latest in his array of honours is that he has emerged as the Most Searched-for Contemporary Scientist Alive.

An informal survey in allafrica.com also showed that Emeagwali, who won the Gordon Bell Prize, seen as a Nobel Prize equivalence for technology, is the most talked about scientist in Africa. The report declared that 90 per cent of Internet searches are conducted outside Africa. "Therefore, this survey is essentially who is hot in the western world", it added.

Emeagwali's website is also number three in Webmaster's Most-linked Scientists in the world. The survey was prompted by a controversy, which started in 2002 when a British Mensa Society voted Emeagwali as the "smartest man alive".

The latest award was triggered by a controversial publication in Sunday Herald, Glasgow on May 5, 2002, which insinuated: "Who is Emeagwali? How come he is not famous?" A source close to Emeagwali.com reacted to the publication thus: "To settle this question, we ask: Who is the world's top scientist? Is it Britain's most famous physicist Stephen Hawkings? Is it America's most famous scientist Stephen Jay Gould? Is it computer pioneer and Nobel laureate Jack Killby? The answer is: None of the above".

The researchers then used the list of 100 greatest scientists and inventors of the 20th century to determine the result. "We used google.com to determine the most popular website for each scientist. Then Link Popularity was used to determine the number of links", they stated.

The rankings, according to its report, reflected all terms entered into the overture search engine by users between February 1 and February 28, 2003. Some of the terms used are that "Scientist's claim to fame must be a discovery or invention, a definition that excludes astronauts, medical doctors and popular writers like Carl Sagan. Scientists that died 50 years earlier such as Albert Einsten, George Washington Carver and Marie Curie, are not included in the ranking of scientists. Top scientists include only contemporary figures (people still living in 2000).

"All spellings and search variations are included in these totals: for instance, searches for Emeagwali and Philip Emeagwali are counted as searches for Philip Emeagwali. Data from Nielsen ratings were used to extrapolate to obtain the total Internet searches".

The team also did a survey of most prominent Africans and Nigerians on the Internet. For the Africans, the group used the 75 names listed in the book African Biography published by Gale Research while the Nigerians were drawn from a list of 100 Nigerians of the Millennium compiled by the Nigerian Internet community.

Out of the 12 Africans listed, Nigeria produced three, among them Prof. Chinua Achebe, Emeagwali and Hakeem Olajuwon. Achebe also tops the chart on the most searched for Nigerians on the Internet. But the result of the world's most searched for scientist on the internet revealed that Emeagwali is number one.

Emeagwali's father went to school with Chike Obi, the first African to get a Ph.D. in Mathematics. He was born in 1954 in Akure, South-West Nigeria. He was raised in Onitsha, which is located south-east Nigeria. Dubbed "Calculus" by schoolmates, Emeagwali at age 14 had mastered the subject, and could even out-calculate his instructors. Then a crisis struck. He had to drop out of school because his family could not afford to send all eight children. But he continued studying on his own, and after getting a General Certificate of Education (GCE) from the University of London. At the age of 17, he was awarded a full scholarship to Oregon State University where he majored in math. Upon graduation, he attended George Washington University and was awarded two engineering master's degrees, one in civil engineering and the other in marine engineering, a master's in mathematicsfrom the University of Maryland.

He later got his doctorate from the University of Michigan in civil engineering (really scientific computing). Emeagwali's greatest achievement, that warranted him the most praise, was The Connection Machine. The Connection Machine utilizes 65,000 computers linked in parallel to form the fastest computer on earth. This computer can perform 3.1 billion calculations per second. This is faster than the theoretical top speed of the Cray Super-computer. Because of The Connection Machine, Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize of 1989. The parallel computer he designed was twice as fast as the previous year's computer. The Connection Machine was a great advancement over previous designs built by IBM's design teams of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. and Fred Brook. He has designed a computer system that has caused him to be called the "Bill Gates of Africa".

At the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of Minnesota, Emeagwali conducts research on next-generation supercomputers that will enable scientists and engineers solve important problems in diverse fields: meteorology, energy, the environment, health, amongst others. He has also worked with the Maryland State Highway Administration, U.S. National Weather Service, US Bureau of Reclamation, and the University of Michigan, where he conducted his award-winning research.

"I find super-computing fascinating, challenging, and critical technology that can be used to solve many important societal problems, such as predicting the spread of AIDS, and many other computational 'grand challenges.' These are scientific problems whose accurate solution requires that a quadrillion or more arithmetical calculations be performed," the computer wizkid says. Such problems are impossible to solve on traditional computers, but massively parallel supercomputers will make it possible.

Major Awards and Prizes Emeagwali has won include the following: Africa's largest scholarly prize Scientist of the Year-from, The National Society of Black Engineers, Pioneer of the Year-from The National Society of Black Engineers, The Nigerian Achiever Award-In 1994, Distinguished Scientist Award-In 1991 from The National Society of Black Engineers in America for Contributions to Computer Science and to the World Community.

"The supercomputer is the driving force behind the computer. The supercomputer of today is the computer of tomorrow. Therefore, predicting the future of computing implicitly forces us to first predict the future of supercomputing. And if history were to repeat itself, one can predict the status of computing at the end of the 21st century by studying next-generation supercomputing.

"As I said earlier, you will find some of my statements outlandish. Now I will make my first outlandish claim about the relationship between the supercomputer and the Internet: Today and at the beginning of the 21st, the supercomputer is similar to the Internet. By the end of the 21st century, the computer, as we know it today, will become obsolete. Then the supercomputer and the Internet will become one and the same.

"My prediction that computers will become obsolete will not seem outlandish when you reflect on the relationship between the supercomputer and the Internet. And also reflect on the driving force behind their evolutions.

"The engine that drives a supercomputer is the tightly-coupled thousands of processors which we've harnessed to compute and communicate simultaneously. Similarly, the engine that drives the Internet is the loosely-coupled millions of computers that we've harnessed to compute and communicate, asynchronously.

"Therefore, both the supercomputer and the Internet, in essence, comprise of interconnected computing and communicating nodes. Both use communication protocols for transmitting and receiving data. And so on", Emeagwali said at a conference of the Black Data Processing Association, Augusta, Georgia, on April 26, 2003.

"Because the fiber-optic network underneath the Internet is physically 10,000 miles wide and metaphorically speaking is like an elephant, it is difficult to find two people who will agree on the best definition of the Internet. To those of us standing on the Earth, the Internet is tool for sending email and surfing the World Wide Web.

"But to an alien from out of space, the Internet will be seen as millions of interconnected computing and communicating nodes. The alien will see the Internet as a spherical object as large as the entire Earth that is used for transmitting and receiving data. I believe that it is the alien, who is observing the Internet from outer space, that will see the true picture. I will ask you to visualize yourself as that alien observing the Internet from the moon. I will also also ask you to travel with me, 100 years into the future.

"My prediction is that, in 100 years, the Internet will evolve and become more tightly coupled. It will be more powerful, faster and more intelligent than what we have today. This will be achieved because the computers at each node will be a zillion times more powerful. And the communication between nodes will also be a zillion times faster. Perhaps, each node might be a zillion times more intelligent. When the Internet becomes a zillion times more powerful, faster and more intelligent: Something weird will then happen", the super brain has spoken!

Emeagwali is married to microbiologist Dale Brown Emeagwali. His own official site, Emeagwali.com, was one of the first personal sites of the Internet.