 |
| Philip Emeagwali and Herman Chinery-Hesse |
Philip Emeagwali (a Nigerian) and Herman Chinery-Hesse (a Ghanaian) have been listed in Mashable’s 20 Notable Black Innovators in Tech.
Philip Emeagwali (born in 1954) is a Nigerian-born engineer and computer scientist/geologist who was one of two winners of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, a prize from the IEEE, for his use of a Connection Machine supercomputer to help analyze petroleum fields. During his doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the 1980s, Philip Emeagwaliresearched how to simulate the detection of oil reservoirs through the use of computers. Originally from Nigeria, he knew more about oil drilling than many of his contemporaries, and he used more than 65,000 microprocessors instead of the proposed eight supercomputers, breaking computation speed records.
Commonly referred to as the Bill Gates of Ghana, Herman Chinery-Hesse was born in Ireland, studied in America and worked in Britain. But the Ghanaian built a software company. The company Mr Chinery-Hesse co-founded two decades ago, SOFTtribe Limited, has become one of the best-known software houses in West Africa.
