Daphne Letitia Smith was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), [1] in 1985. [2] She is the president of the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College, her alma mater, and a member of Spelman's Board of Trustees; in 2011 she was honored with the Alumnae Association's Hall of Fame Award, "the organization’s highest honor". [3]
Smith is originally from Ocala, Florida, [1] and graduated from Spelman College in 1980. [3] At MIT, she studied probability theory as a student of Richard M. Dudley; her dissertation was Vapnik-Červonenkis Classes and the Supremum Distribution of a Gaussian Process. [2] She taught at the University of Georgia, Georgia State University and Spelman College before turning to industry, where she has worked as a mathematician and healthcare analyst specializing in disease management. [3]
Spelman College is a private, historically Black, women's liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a founding member of the Atlanta University Center academic consortium. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Spelman awarded its first college degrees in 1901 and is the oldest private historically Black liberal arts institution for women.
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university; she earned it in 1949 from Yale University. She graduated from Smith College in 1945. She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.
Etta Zuber Falconer was an American educator and mathematician the bulk of whose career was spent at Spelman College, where she eventually served as department head and associate provost. She was one of the earlier African-American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics.
Evelynn Maxine Hammonds is an American feminist and scholar. She is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College. The intersections of race, gender, science and medicine are prominent research topics across her published works. Hammonds received degrees in engineering and physics. Before getting her PhD in the History of Science at Harvard, she was a computer programmer. She began her teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later moving to Harvard. In 2008, Hammonds was appointed dean, the first African-American and the first woman to head the college. She returned to full-time teaching in 2013.
Amalia K. Amaki is an African-American artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who recently resided in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa from 2007 to 2012.
Phyllis Ann Fox was an American mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist.
Selena Sloan Butler (1872–1964) was the founder and first president of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers Association (NCCPT). President Herbert Hoover appointed her to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection in 1929. During World War II, she organized the Red Cross' first black women's chapter of "Gray Ladies." When Congress merged the NCCPT with the National PTA in 1970, Butler was posthumously recognized as one of the organization's founders. Today, Butler is considered a co-founder of the National Parent-Teacher Association.
Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman is an American mathematician and Mathematics educator.
Shirley Ann Mathis McBay was an American mathematician who was the founder and president of the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network, a nonprofit dedicated to improving minority education. She was the dean for student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1980 to 1990. She was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. McBay was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.
Talithia D. Williams is an American statistician and mathematician at Harvey Mudd College who researches the spatiotemporal structure of data. She was the first black woman to achieve tenure at Harvey Mudd College. Williams is an advocate for engaging more African Americans in engineering and science.
Georgia Caldwell Smith (1909–1961) was one of the first African-American women to gain a bachelor's degree in mathematics. When she was 51, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics, one of the earliest by an African-American woman, awarded posthumously in 1961. Smith was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College.
Tasha Rose Inniss is an American mathematician and the director of education and industry outreach for the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Yewande Olubummo is a Nigerian-American mathematician whose research interests include functional analysis and dynamical systems. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Spelman College, where she served as chair of the mathematics department from 2006 to 2010. She is a member of the National Association of Mathematicians, as well as the Mathematical Association of America.
Shelly Monica Jones is an American mathematics educator. She is an associate professor of mathematics education at Central Connecticut State University.
Adelaide Smith was an American mathematician who studied with David Hilbert at the University of Göttingen, traveled to South Africa to teach at the only women's college south of the equator, and wrote two books about her experiences there. Her appointment as a mathematics instructor at the University of California, Berkeley was reported nationally. In later life she became the principal of a school for girls, the second oldest in California.
Leona Ann Harris is an American mathematician who is the Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) at the American Mathematical Society (AMS). She was the executive director of the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) from 2019 to 2022.
Eleanor Lutia Ison Franklin was an American endocrinologist and medical physiologist.