mathematics

List of African-American mathematicians

List of African-American mathematicians is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand List of African-American mathematicians rather than just read about it. In short: The bestselling book and film, Hidden Figures, celebrated the contributions of African-American women mathematicians during the space race and highlighted the barriers they faced in studying and pursuing careers in mathematics and related fields. While Hidden Figures brought attention to these women, many other achievements by African Americans in mathematical sciences, research, education, and applied fields have a…

Key takeaways

List of African-American mathematicians belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect List of African-American mathematicians to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of List of African-American mathematicians from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The bestselling book and film, Hidden Figures, celebrated the contributions of African-American women mathematicians during the space race and highlighted the barriers they faced in studying and pursuing careers in mathematics and related fields. While Hidden Figures brought attention to these women, many other achievements by African Americans in mathematical sciences, research, education, and applied fields have also remained relatively unknown. Despite this, the community of African-American mathematicians has been growing. Between 2000 and 2015, African Americans represented approximately 4–6% of graduates majoring in mathematics and statistics in the United States. This list catalogs Wikipedia articles on African Americans in mathematics, as well as early recipients of doctoral degrees in mathematics and mathematics education, books and studies about African-American mathematicians, and other major landmarks.

Historical landmarks

1792: Benjamin Banneker calculated planetary movements and predicted eclipses in his Almanac. 1867: Howard University established its Department of Mathematics. 1895: Joseph Carter Corbin, president of Branch Normal College (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), published his first problem in American Mathematical Monthly. 1916: Dudley Weldon Woodard became a charter member of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). 1925: Elbert Frank Cox was the first African-American awarded a doctoral degree in mathematics, from Cornell University. 1929: Dudley Weldon Woodard was the first African-American mathematician known to publish in a mathematics journal, with the article "On two-dimensional analysis situs with special reference to the Jordan curve-theorem" in Fundamenta Mathematicae. 1943: Euphemia Lofton Haynes was the first African-American woman to gain a doctoral degree in mathematics. 1951: The MAA Board of Governors adopted a resolution to conduct their scientific and business meetings, and social gatherings "without discrimination as to race, creed, or color". 1956: Gloria Ford Gilmer is believed to have been the first African-American woman to publish mathematical research, co-authoring an article in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society and another in Pacific Journal of Mathematics. 1969: 17 African-American mathematicians met in New Orleans, forming the National Association of Mathematicians to "promote excellence in the mathematical sciences and to promote the mathematical development of under-represented American minorities". 1973: Mathematician David Blackwell became the first African-American in any field to be elected to membership of the National Academy of Sciences. 1976: Howard University established the first PhD program in mathematics at a historically black college or university under mathematics department chair James Donaldson and professor J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. 1980: The Claytor Lecture – now the Claytor-Woodard Lecture in honor of William W S Claytor and Dudley Weldon Woodard – was established at MAA. 1982: Civil rights leader, Bob Moses (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), used his MacArthur Fellowship to start the Algebra Project, a national mathematics literacy program for high schools. 1988: The MAA established a task force that led to the formation in 1990 of SUMMA, a program for the Strengthening of Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement.

1992: Mathematician Freeman Hrabowski became president of the University of Maryland. 1994: The Blackwell Lecture was established for MAA meetings, jointly by MAA and NAM, as well as the NAM Wilkins Lecture and Bharucha-Reid Lecture. 1995: The first CAARMS – Conference for African American Researchers in Mathematical Sciences – was held, to highlight the work of researchers and students and encourage the careers of under-represented groups in mathematics. Proceedings are published by the American Mathematical Society in its Contemporary Mathematics series. 1997: Kathleen Adebola Okikiolu was the first African American awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship and Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. 1997 Scott W. Williams produced the website Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, a collection of African-American mathematicians, newsletter, and resources on Africans in mathematics. By early 2007 it had close to 5 million visitors. The website has been cataloged by the Library of Congress. 1999: The mathematics departments of the 25 highest-ranked universities in the US had more than 900 faculty members, of whom 4 were African-American. 2003: Clarence F. Stephens was the first African-American to be honored with the Mathematical Association of America's (MAA) most prestigious award, for Distinguished Service to Mathematics. 2004: The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) and MAA formally established the Etta Zuber Falconer Lecture. 2015: Katherine Coleman Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 2016: Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterley, was published, going on to win multiple awards and reach number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It tells the story of African-American women mathematicians at NASA during the space race. 2017: The film adaptation, Hidden Figures, was nominated for best movie at the Academy Awards, and Katherine Johnson makes an appearance at the ceremony. 2020: The updated website Mathematicians of the African Diaspora debuted in October. The new site is supported by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) and the Educational Advancement Foundation (EAF).

Doctoral degrees in mathematics The lists of doctoral degrees, including the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in mathematics and Doctor of Education (EdD), draw from these sources: Turner (1971), Greene (1974), Williams (1997), Zeitz (2008), Shakil (2010), and the Mathematical Association of America. (Please add any further candidates for these lists here, or on the talk page.)

First men and women These are the first 12 known PhDs by African-American men and women in mathematics, in alphabetical order for years with multiple doctorate holders.

Doctoral degrees 1925 to 1975 This list includes PhDs awarded to African-Americans and to African immigrants by academic institutions in the United States.

Doctoral degrees in mathematics education to 1975 This list includes doctorates specifically in mathematics education and doctorates in education by mathematicians/mathematics educators.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with List of African-American mathematicians

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what List of African-American mathematicians claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to List of African-American mathematicians before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about List of African-American mathematicians ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of List of African-American mathematicians

In research: List of African-American mathematicians appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses List of African-American mathematicians in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: List of African-American mathematicians is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics African-American mathematicians, Lists of African-American people, Lists of mathematicians by nationality, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for List of African-American mathematicians outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “List of African-American mathematicians” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study List of African-American mathematicians in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what List of African-American mathematicians means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain List of African-American mathematicians out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is List of African-American mathematicians in simple terms?

Why does List of African-American mathematicians matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study List of African-American mathematicians?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on List of African-American mathematicians.