mathematics

Talitha Washington

Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington rather than just read about it. In short: Talitha Washington (born 1974) is an American mathematician and academic who specializes in applied mathematics and STEM education policy. She was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Talitha Washington (born 1974) is an American mathematician and academic who specializes in applied mathematics and STEM education policy. She was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree. Washington became the 26th president of the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2023.

Education and career Washington was born in Frankfort, Indiana, and adopted at a young age by Ruthanne and Walter Wangerin. She was raised in Evansville, Indiana, and attended Benjamin Bosse High School. After serving in Costa Rica with the American Field Service, she earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Spelman College in 1996. She then attended the University of Connecticut, earning a master's degree in 1998 and a Ph.D. in 2001. Her doctoral thesis was Mathematical Model of Proteins Acting as On/Off Switches, under the supervision of Yung-Sze Choi. Washington served on the faculty of Duke University from 2001 to 2003, the College of New Rochelle from 2003 to 2005, the University of Evansville from 2005 to 2011, and Howard University, starting in 2011, where she became associate professor of mathematics. After a few years on leave as a program director at the National Science Foundation, in 2020 she became the inaugural director of the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC) Data Science Initiative. In 2022 she became president-elect of the Association for Women in Mathematics and assumed the presidency on February 1, 2023. In 2025, Washington was named the executive director of the Howard University Center for Applied Data Science and Analytics and the Sean McCleese Endowed Chair in Computer Science, Race, and Social Justice. Washington's research interests include nonstandard finite difference (NSFD) schemes for certain systems of differential equations, including population models, one-dimensional systems, and the Black–Scholes equation.

Education policy and awards Washington is active in education policy, especially best practices on achieving racial and ethnic diversity in STEM. At the NSF, she has served as co-lead of the Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program and is a graduate of the STEM diversity organization SACNAS. She serves on the Council of the American Mathematical Society and served on the Executive Committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Washington helped to champion the once-forgotten mathematician Elbert Frank Cox (1895–1969) from her hometown of Evansville, leading to the November 2006 unveiling of a plaque honoring the longtime Howard professor as the first African-American scholar to earn a doctorate in mathematics. She received the 2019 Black Engineer of the Year Awards STEM Innovator Award. Talitha Washington was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, Class of 2021. Her citation read "For contributions to broadening the participation of underrepresented groups, and service to the mathematical profession". Washington was also named a Fellow of the AWM, Class of 2021, "for her dedication to raise awareness of African American women in STEM; for her lifelong promotion of Historically Black Colleges and Universities; and for her unwavering dedication to the National Association of Mathematicians." On February 1, 2022, she became president-elect of the AWM. She was elected to the 2022 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Selected publications Applied mathematics R. E. Mickens and T. M. Washington. "A Note on Exact Finite Difference Schemes for the Differential Equations Satisfied by the Jacobi Cosine and Sine Functions" Journal of Difference Equations and Applications, Vol. 19, Iss. 2 (2013), pp. 1042–1047. T. M. Washington. NSFD "Representations for Polynomial Terms Appearing in the Potential Functions of 1-Dimensional Conservative Systems" Computers & Mathematics with Applications, Vol. 66, Iss. 11 (2013), pp. 2251–2258. R. E. Mickens and T. M. Washington. NSFD "Discretizations of Interacting Population Models Satisfying Conservation Laws" Computers & Mathematics with Applications, Vol. 66, Iss. 11 (2013), pp. 2307–2316. E. H. Goins and T. M. Washington. "On the Generalized Climbing Stairs Problem" Ars Combinatoria, Vol. 117 (2014), pp. 183–190. R. E. Mickens, J. Munyakazi and T. M. Washington. "A Note on the Exact Discretization for a Cauchy-Euler ODE: Application to the Black-Scholes Equation" Journal of Difference Equations and Applications, Vol. 21, Iss. 7 (2015), pp. 547–552. O. Adekanye and T. Washington. "Numerical Comparison of Nonstandard Schemes for the Airy Equation" International Journal of Applied Mathematical Research, Vol. 6, Iss. 4 (2017), pp. 141–146. O. Adekanye and T. Washington. "Nonstandard Finite Difference Scheme for a Tacoma Narrows Bridge Model" Applied Mathematical Modelling, Accepted May 21, 2018. STEM education policy T. M. Washington. "Evansville Honors the First Black Ph.D. in Mathematics and His Family" The Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 55, Iss. 5 (2008), pp. 588–589. M. J. Wolyniak, C. J. Alvarez, V. Chandrasekaran, T. M. Grana, A. Holgado, C. J. Jones, R. W. Morris, A. L. Pereira, J. Stamm, T. M. Washington, and Y. Yang. "Building Better Scientists Through Cross-disciplinary Collaboration in Synthetic Biology: A Meeting Report from the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching Workshop 2010" CBE-Life Sciences Education, Vol. 9, No. 4 (2010), pp. 399–404. R. De Veaux, M. Agarwal, M. Averett, B. Baumer, A. Bray, T. Bressoud, L. Bryant, L. Cheng, A. Francis, R. Gould, A. Y. Kim, M. Kretchmar, Q. Lu, A. Moskol, D. Nolan, R. Pelayo, S. Raleigh, R. J. Sethi, M. Sondjaja, N. Tiruviluamala, P. Uhlig, T. Washington, C. Wesley, D. White, P. Ye. "Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science" Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Vol. 4 (2017), pp. 2.1-2.16. V. R. Morris and T. Washington. "The Role of Professional Societies in STEM Diversity" Journal of the National Technical Association, Vol. 87, Iss. 1 (2017), pp. 22–31. T. Washington. "Behind Every Successful Woman, There are a Few Good Men" The Notices of the AMS, Vol. 65, Iss. 02 (2018), pp. 132–134.

References

External links Talitha Washington at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Talitha Washington homepage

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Talitha Washington

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington

In research: Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington 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: Talitha Washington is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1974 births, 21st-century American mathematicians, 21st-century American women mathematicians, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Talitha Washington 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.

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How to study Talitha Washington in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Talitha Washington in simple terms?

Why does Talitha Washington 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 Talitha Washington?

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 Talitha Washington.