The bottom has
fallen out of Phillip Emeagwali’s basket of false claims. American oil
giant, ExxonMobil, has told NEXT exclusively that it has never dealt
with the American-based Nigerian scientist, contrary to Mr. Emeagwali’s
repeated claim that he wrote the equations that the company used to
simulate the flow of oil, water, and gas inside its reservoirs.
Authorities at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy
laboratory, where Mr. Emeagwali claimed he sourced the Connection
Machine for his award-winning experiment, also said they had never
related with the Nigerian scientist.
Even the Institute
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the world’s largest
organisation of computer experts, has reacted to the scandal
surrounding Mr Emeagwali by removing the scientist’s profile from its
website. Mr. Emeagwali’s bio on the site contained some contentious
claims, including one that he has a doctorate.
Mr. Emeagwali did not respond to email seeking his comment. He also did not return calls made to his Washington D.C. office.
In 1989, Emeagwali, 56, won the $1,000 prize for writing a programme for oil reservoir modeling. Afterwards,
he travelled around
the world for over two decades marketing himself as one of the
inventors of the Internet. A gullible Africa believed him, and his
native Nigeria lavishly celebrated him as the country’s most
influential scientist ever.
But in November,
leading American computer experts, including Gordon Bell, the man after
whom the prize he won in 1989 was named, exposed Mr. Emeagwali,
describing his 20-year claim that his invention gave birth to the
Internet as fraudulent.
However, Mr.
Emeagwali continued to make other claims which are now considered
largely untrue. For instance, in a series of weekly articles he wrote
for nigeriavillagesquare.com, Mr. Emeagwali said he “scribbled the
actual equations used by the oil company Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) to
simulate the flow of oil, water, and gas inside its petroleum
reservoirs.” He claimed that after learning about his discovery, Mobil
Research and Development invited him (in a letter dated March 19, 1990)
to help the company in “reservoir simulation.” Mr Emeagwali added that
he discovered that Mobil’s equations did not reflect reality and
corrected the company’s error.
But responding to a
NEXT inquiry, ExxonMobil simply disowned Mr. Emeagwali. “We are unaware
of Mr. Emeagwali’s claimed interaction 20 years ago with a prior
affiliate of ExxonMobil,” Patrick McGinn of the Upstream Media
Relations Unit of the company, said in an email from the Texas
headquarters of the oil firm, after a 10-day investigation within his
company.
Initially, Mr.
McGinn described Mr. Emeagwali’s claim as speculations to which
ExxonMobil Corporation won’t react. But when pressed, he came out to
say clearly that his company had no record of ever having dealt with
Mr. Emeagwali.
Before ExxonMobil
disowned Mr. Emeagwali, Angela Burgess, executive director of IEEE
computer society, had informed NEXT that the Nigerian scientist’s
profile on her organisation’s website had been removed following doubts
about some claims contained therein. Mr. Emeagwali provided the
information for the article, which falsely portrayed him as having
earned a first degree from the University of London and a doctorate
from the University of Michigan.
From the Los Alamos
National Laboratory also came another blow for the embattled scientist.
Mr. Emeagwali had claimed in a January 2007 TIME magazine article that,
through research, he found a “Connection Machine” at the laboratory
which had sat unused after scientists had given up on figuring out how
to make it simulate nuclear explosions.
Lost in Los Alamos
In 1987, Mr
Emeagwali told TIME, he applied for and was given permission to use the
machine. He said from his base in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he remotely
programmed the machine (in Northern New Mexico) and used it to compute
the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir, and perform 3.1 billion
calculations per second.
But authorities at the 67-year-old laboratory said the claims were “unsubstantiated – at best.”
“Several current
LANL scientists who worked directly on Thinking Machines CM-2 and CM-5
computing system development during that time frame have no
recollection of working with Philip Emeagwali,” said Kevin Roark of the
Communications Office of the laboratory.
“It is certainly
untrue that the computers “sat unused after scientists had given up” on
figuring out how to make them work. In fact, the laboratory
successfully developed codes for the CM-2 and CM-5 that were very
effective for conventional defense calculations and important aspects
of nuclear weapon assessments/design.” Meanwhile, a source in the
Federal Ministry of Information and Communication said the Minister,
Dora Akunyili, was in the process of raising a committee to investigate
allegations of fraudulent claims levelled against Mr. Emeagwali.
The source said the Permanent Secretary in the ministry, S.O. Willoughby, might head the committee.
Mrs. Akunyili had told NEXT on November 7 that government will
investigate the allegations to enable it to determine whether to remove
Mr. Emeagwali’s face from the Nigerian stamp. The minister did not
return calls made to her mobile telephone on Friday.
