More troubles for Emeagwali - Alan Karp, 1989 Gordon Bell Prize judge, Debunks Emeagwali’s "Father Of The Internet" Claims

Alan Karp, a key judge in the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize won by Mr. Philip Emeagwali, has debunked Mr. Emeagwali’s claims concerning that prize and his place in science and technology, and pointed out that none of Emeagwali's experiments could be regarded as "discoveries or inventions".

In an email exchange with Saharareporters, Mr. Karp, who is currently Principal Scientist, Virus Safe Computing Initiative at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, confirmed that many of the claims made by Emeagwali regarding his Gordon Bell Prize were inaccurate or misleading.

Saharareporters had sent to Mr. Karp three of the recent claims by Mr. Emeagwali’s wife and representative, “Donita Brown,” and heard back on each point.  

    •    Mrs. Emeagwali’s first claim was: "The four judges that gave him the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize interviewed him daily by email for 60 days. Those four judges, in turn, emailed his discoveries and inventions to as many as 400 fact-checkers and experts." 

Responded Mr. Karp, who said the other judges left those things to him:  “I definitely did not communicate with him every day for 60 days.  Further, I did email his “discoveries and inventions” to one or two outside experts, not 400.”

    •    Mrs. Emeagwali’s second claim was: “Specifically, he claimed he reprogrammed 65,536 subcomputers to compute as a supercomputer and to communicate as an internet that sends and receives answers via emails to and from 65,536 unique email addresses, each a unique string of sixteen zeroes and ones." 

This claim was aggressively peddled by Mrs. Emeagwali on 234next.com in response to an article written by Jubril Ibrahim, in which the writer also accused Emeagwali of fraud. 

Responded Mr. Karp: "The Connection Machine that he used, the CM2, consisted of 65,536 one-bit processors with a proprietary interconnect and was intended to be used as a single supercomputer.  No “reprogramming” was required.  To say that one used email to communicate on an Internet among them is misleading at best.  The CM2 did not use email as we would understand it today for its internal communications.  An Internet, as the name implies, is made up of many independent networks connected together.  The CM2 was a single network."

    •    The third issue, regarding Mr. Emeagwali’s claims of "discoveries or inventions," attracted Mr. Karp’s most potent dismissal.  He made it clear that none of Emeagwali's experiments could be regarded as "discoveries or inventions". This might largely explain why Mr. Emeagwali never had a patent at the USPTO except his trademark over his website domain name, "Emeagwali.com."

    •    The final claim by Mrs. Emeagwali last week, was about the CM2 machine, and she wrote:   In 1989, there was only one supercomputer that was powered by 65,000 subcomputers. It only allowed ONE programmer. Philip Emeagwali was logged onto it sixteen hours a day, 365 days a year. Philip Emeagwali was then the only full time programmer of the supercomputer powered by 65,000 subcomputers. It was a one man race…”

To this claim, Mr. Karp told Saharareporters that Mr. Emeagwali didn’t win “by default,” and conceded that “as a lone graduate student he solved a harder problem that could have taken a team to solve,” as our earlier Citizen Report suggested.  He however expressed disbelief about the uniqueness of the machine, saying, "I doubt that there was only one CM2 in existence in 1989 because the performance winner that year also used a CM2.  If there was, then that group used the same machine as Mr. Emeagwali, so he could not have been the only programmer on it…I don’t recall if we were ever told who gave Mr. Emeagwali access to the CM2, but that person can answer this question."

The assertion by Mr. Karp that the Gordon Bell prize was awarded to Emeagwali after “careful consideration to his submission by a lone graduate student on a hard problem” however remains at odds with the official record of the 1989 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1989 (IEEE) Gordon Bell Prize, which clearly states that he only won it because the Mobil/TMC team (which had a higher speed/price performance) was forbidden from claiming more than one prize. 

Even as the light of truth begins to shine on the numerous fraudulent claims by Emeagwali, he continues to make outrageous claims, including one that "scientists continue to pay him a speaker’s fee equivalent to a professor’s yearly salary".  We would be happy to share the limelight of any Nigerian so respected in his field he commands such speaking fees, but this claim lacks merit, as no serious scientific fora invites Mr. Emeagwali.  Indeed, Nigerian officials, who spend thousands of dollars to invite him to speak at Consulate-sponsored events, do.  Through his outrageous claims, he has managed to con the Nigerian government to put him on a federal stamp in which he is referred to as a "Super Computer Genius".

Emeagwali has also mastered the concept of quietly removing his false claims from articles that are challenged by those who are familiar with his trickery.  That was the case of his biodata on the Lemelson-MIT journal which claimed he had 31 patents to his credit; that claim was discreetly removed in 2004 after it was discovered that Mr. Emeagwali had lied, but a web archive of the original material as seen here proved Emeagwali's downfall. After we unsuccesfully searched for Emeagwali's name from Lemeslon-MIT website, SaharaReporters e-mailed Stephanie Martinovich,External Relations Officer of Lemelson-MIT Program to inquire why the center removed Emeagwali's citation from its website, a short response from her stated, "I looked into this and no one knows what happened to the link or why it was removed. Sorry we can't be more help."

After contacting the center today they also removed the web archive of Emeagwali's biodata completely from their website.

Another trick is to downgrade his claims whenever possible.  One example is the often repeated claim of being “the father of the internet.”  In a curious climb-down, following withering critical assaults, that has now been downgraded, and his current claims only refer him as "a father of the internet” or “one of the fathers of the internet". But it should also be mentioned that another variant implied  by Donita Brown's response to our initial piece on Emeagwali's facebook page is that of "father of an internet."

It was obvious from Mr. Karp's response to Saharareporters that the judges who awarded him the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989 would like to end his falsehoods.   Mr. Emeagwali, however, thrives on using racism to attack largely white scientists who try to challenge his false claims. 

On the Nigerian front, the ethnic card seems to be his favourite weapon, as he encourages those who are more interested in ethnic bigotry, and—like Science itself—less in the facts and proof.