Carolyn Mahoney

Last updated
Carolyn Mahoney
18th President of Lincoln University of Missouri
In office
2005–2012
Personal details
Born1946
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.
Alma mater Siena College (B.S.)
Ohio State University (M.S., Ph.D)

Carolyn Ray Boone Mahoney (born 1946) is an American mathematician who served as president of Lincoln University of Missouri. [1] Her research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, and matroids. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Carolyn Mahoney was born the sixth of thirteen children in 1946 in Memphis, Tennessee to Stephen and Myrtle Boone. Her grandmother cared for the children while her mother worked. Mahoney attended Catholic schools, where she was encouraged in her interest in mathematics by the nuns. As a teenager, Mahoney's parents separated due to her father's drinking and gambling and the family was forced to move to a lower-class neighborhood.

Mahoney and her siblings were known for being smart in their neighborhood. She graduated from Father Bertrand High School in 1964. [2]

Mahoney attended Mount St. Scholastica College, a Catholic, all-female college in Kansas for three years before finishing her degree in mathematics at Siena College in Memphis, Tennessee in 1970. [2] She then earned her master's degree in mathematics in 1972 and a doctorate in 1983, both from Ohio State University. Her doctorate involved matroid theory and enumerative combinatorics, and was supervised by Thomas Allan Dowling. She was the 25th black woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in the U.S. [3]

Career

After earning her doctorate, Mahoney taught first at Denison University from 1984 to 1989, and Ohio State for two years. She also served on the test development committee for the College Board from 1986 to 1989. In 1989, Mahoney was the first mathematician to be selected for the faculty at California State University San Marcos, [2] and was one of twelve founding faculty of the San Marcos campus. [1]

In 1994 and 1995, Mahoney served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, and she later worked as an administrator at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. In 2005, Mahoney was named president of Lincoln University of Missouri. [1] She retired in 2012. [4]

Contributions

Mahoney's research has focused largely on open problems in graph theory and combinatorics. As well as her thesis work on matroids, she has also published research on the Hadwiger–Nelson problem concerning the chromatic number of unit distance graphs. [5]

She believes that she has had a hard time finding collaborators due to the fact that she is a Black female in mathematics. She is also a proponent of educational reform, especially supporting cultural diversity in university faculty. She believes that through the efforts of organizations such as the Mathematical Association of America and the Association for Women in Mathematics the environment for women in mathematics has improved. [2]

Awards and honors

In 1989, Mahoney was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame. [3]

A scholarship at CSU San Marcos [6] and a walking trail at Lincoln University [7] have been named in her honor.

Mahoney was also recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree. [8]

Related Research Articles

Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many applications ranging from logic to statistical physics and from evolutionary biology to computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. T. Tutte</span> British-Canadian codebreaker and mathematician

William Thomas TutteOC FRS FRSC was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fan Chung</span> American mathematician

Fan-Rong King Chung Graham, known professionally as Fan Chung, is an American mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular in generalizing the Erdős–Rényi model for graphs with general degree distribution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Béla Bollobás</span> Hungarian mathematician

Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős since the age of 14.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Rado</span> British mathematician

Richard Rado FRS was a German-born British mathematician whose research concerned combinatorics and graph theory. He was Jewish and left Germany to escape Nazi persecution. He earned two PhDs: in 1933 from the University of Berlin, and in 1935 from the University of Cambridge. He was interviewed in Berlin by Lord Cherwell for a scholarship given by the chemist Sir Robert Mond which provided financial support to study at Cambridge. After he was awarded the scholarship, Rado and his wife left for the UK in 1933. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Reading in 1954 and remained there until he retired in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Seymour (mathematician)</span> British mathematician

Paul D. Seymour is a British mathematician known for his work in discrete mathematics, especially graph theory. He was responsible for important progress on regular matroids and totally unimodular matrices, the four colour theorem, linkless embeddings, graph minors and structure, the perfect graph conjecture, the Hadwiger conjecture, claw-free graphs, χ-boundedness, and the Erdős–Hajnal conjecture. Many of his recent papers are available from his website.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robin Wilson (mathematician)</span> British mathematician

Robin James Wilson is an English mathematician. He is an emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Open University, having previously been Head of the Pure Mathematics Department and Dean of the Faculty. He was a stipendiary lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford and, as of 2006, Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, where he has also been a visiting professor. On occasion, he teaches at Colorado College in the United States. He is also a long standing fellow of Keble College, Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Edmonds</span> American/Canadian mathematician and computer scientist

Jack R. Edmonds is an American-born and educated computer scientist and mathematician who lived and worked in Canada for much of his life. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, discrete mathematics and the theory of computing. He was the recipient of the 1985 John von Neumann Theory Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cheryl Praeger</span> Australian mathematician

Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc (1969) and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland (1974), and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.

Crispin St John Alvah Nash-Williams FRSE was a British mathematician. His research interest was in the field of discrete mathematics, especially graph theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">U. S. R. Murty</span>

Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty, is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo.

Jennifer McNulty is an American mathematician and academic administrator, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her research is in combinatorics, specializing in matroid theory and graph theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carla Cotwright-Williams</span> African-American mathematician

Carla Denise Cotwright-Williams is an American mathematician who works as a Technical Director and Data Scientist for the United States Department of Defense. She was the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Mississippi.

Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and violinist who works as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. She is a winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize and of the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Her research involves combinatorial commutative algebra, graph theory, and tropical geometry.

Rosa C. Orellana is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic combinatorics and representation theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College.

Joy Morris is a Canadian mathematician whose research involves group theory, graph theory, and the connections between the two through Cayley graphs. She is also interested in mathematics education, is the author of two open-access undergraduate mathematics textbooks, and oversees a program in which university mathematics education students provide a drop-in mathematics tutoring service for parents of middle school students. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Lethbridge.

Naiomi Tuere Cameron is an American mathematician working in the field of combinatorics. She is an associate professor at Spelman College as well as the vice president of National Association of Mathematicians. She was previously an associate professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR.

Christina Eubanks-Turner is a professor of mathematics in the Seaver College of Science and Engineering at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Her academic areas of interest include graph theory, commutative algebra, mathematics education, and mathematical sciences diversification. She is also the Director of the Master's Program in Teaching Mathematics at LMU.

Kristina L. Vušković is a Serbian mathematician and theoretical computer scientist working in graph theory. She is Professor in Algorithms and Combinatorics in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, and a professor of computer science at Union University (Serbia).

Debra Lynn Boutin is an American mathematician, the Samuel F. Pratt Professor of Mathematics at Hamilton College, where she chairs the mathematics department. Her research involves the symmetries of graphs and distinguishing colorings of graphs.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Carolyn Mahoney, Black Women in Mathematics, Scott W. Williams, State University of New York at Buffalo, retrieved 2015-02-15.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Warren, Wini (1999). Black women scientists in the United States . Bloomington, Ind. [u.a.]: Indiana University Press. pp.  181–185. ISBN   0253336031.
  3. 1 2 Carolyn Mahoney, Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, retrieved 2015-02-21.
  4. Fabuliner, Ryan (April 24, 2012), Lincoln University President to retire, KBIA .
  5. Chilakamarri, Kiran B.; Mahoney, Carolyn R. (1996), "Unit-distance graphs, graphs on the integer lattice and a Ramsey type result", Aequationes Mathematicae , 51 (1–2): 48–67, doi:10.1007/BF01831139, MR   1372782, S2CID   189831504 .
  6. Carolyn Mahoney scholarship, CSU San Marcos, retrieved 2015-02-21.
  7. Watson, Bob (August 16, 2012), "LU celebrates Mahoney retirement, leadership: Curators name portion of Greenway trail in her honor", News-Tribune, archived from the original on 2015-02-22.
  8. "Carolyn Ray Boone Mahoney". Mathematically Gifted & Black.