Philip Emeagwali

The 65,536 processors were inside the Connection Machine.

My focus is not on solving nature's deeper mysteries. It is on using nature's deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems.

It is smarter to borrow from nature than to reinvent the wheels.

First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.

I have expertise in five different fields which helps me to easily understand the analogy between my scientific problems and those occurring in nature.

Due to financial reasons, I dropped out of school after eight years of formal schooling.

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.

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.

Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.

I dropped out of high school four times between the ages of 12 to 17.

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.