Journeys of Black Mathematicians

What does a mathematician look like?

That's another question.

What does a mathematician look like?

What you got?

You don't look like a mathematician.

They wear glasses.

Yeah.

Khaki pants.

Circle glasses.

Dress shoes.

Uh huh.

And a button up shirt.

My name is Johnny Houston.

I'm an African American mathematician.

My name is Monica Jackson.

I'm a mathematician.

My name is Akil Parker, and I'm a mathematician.

My name is Duane Cooper.

My name is Dawn A. Lott.

I am Dr. Anisah NuMan and I am a mathematician.

I am a mathematician.

Emille Davie Lawrence Dr. Bonita V. Saunders Freeman Hrabowski Asamoah Nkwanta And I'm a mathematician.

Mel Currie and I'm a mathematician.

Dr. Talitha Washington, and I am a mathematician.

What is mathematics?

Its understanding the basic law of the universe we live in.

Sometimes this might include laws that we don't know exist.

I mean, we might exist in a non-Euclidean universe.

No matter where you go, and what career you choose, learning to make ... solve problems and make decisions those are two things that are key for any career.

And that's what mathematics teaches you.

You need ability to do logical thinking, not using formulas to do your work, but logical thinking for problem-solving.

Mathematics can answer so many questions.

What's beautiful for me about mathematics is it's a way to just tie everything up in a bow and say, Oh, that's that, that's done.

We've solved it.

It's proven.

And no one else can shake this logic.

Math, to me, is the foundation of life.

Math is the foundation of a lot of what we do.

Math is so broad and so vast.

Anything that you think of involves math.

When people find out what I do, or how rare it is to have a Black woman mathematician, I think that they are very, very surprised.

When Blacks first came to Virginia, they were enslaved until 1865.

Now they were not allowed to go to school.

Our school was made after the Civil War.

They wanted to help the little Black kids because during the Civil War, Blacks were not allowed to read, or to write unless they did have someone who would try to help them, like Frederick Douglass.

I was was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina.

And my elementary school was a two-room schoolhouse.

And the teacher was Annie Hudson She would bring to class Look magazine, Ebony magazine.

We would look at these magazines and it was so different than the lives we lived.

Around ninth grade, I started to learn a few things about mathematics.

I had an uncle who gave me a slide rule, and I taught myself how to use it.

I had to learn about logarithms and also some trigonometry.

In South Carolina in the sixties, I actually could overhear White men talking about what they would do if anybody tried to integrate schools.

These guys were sitting around with shotguns in their lap, they had been out shooting rabbits.

And the last thing I wanted was integrated schools.

I had no protection against these guys if they wanted to do something like that.

There are a lot of people my age who claim that so-called integration of the educational system was a disservice to our community.

One of the first things it did is it got rid of our high school Secondly, it took the teachers that we had that were good and took them away from us.

Most of my math and science teachers did not go to the integrated high school.

They left the state or they taught at junior college When I started teaching in Raleigh, the superintendent said to me, Those Negroes don't need anything but simple arithmetic. And when I went there, the high school for Black kids, We had one algebra class, no geometry classes at all.

And I started teaching them everything.

And the next year we had one or two geometry classes, a trigonometry class.

And the Whites wanted to know, how did these get up there?

And they said, "Virginia Newell did it."

Well, I was a bad person to teach those little kids that.

I can remember going on the third floor of the library and finding a book called Black Mathematicians and Their Works.

And that's where I learned of all of these famous mathematicians: David Blackwell, J. Ernest Wilkins, Marjorie Lee Browne, Scott Williams.

That book inspired me as well.

Edward Bouchet was a physics major at Yale University and got a PhD in theoretical physics in 1877.

And during his entire lifetime, not a single university or White college ever hired Bouchet.

He was here on this earth with all this training, all this ability and nobody would allow him to practice his craft.

W.W.S.

Claytor was the third African American to get a PhD in mathematics.

Walter Claytor wanted to be a research mathematician.

Walter was a professor at Howard University in DC.

He became very close to my parents.

My mother said that he was quite excited when he learned I was writing a thesis in topology.

He was invited to go to the Institute for Advanced Study, and Princeton was afraid that this Black man would have some contact with their students.

So they would not allow Walter Claytor to go to the Institute for Advanced Study.

He loved mathematics, loved doing research in mathematics, but he was discouraged and really demoralized.

I had a father with a PhD in psychology, a mother with two master's degrees.

Every single uncle and aunt had at least a master's degree.

So I came from a family where I think education was extraordinarily important, and I had to fight.

It wasn't easy.

I mean, I had a 10th grade geometry teacher who wanted to fail me.

He didn't.

He gave me a D. America, America.

Although you feed me bread baked of bitterness, and slice your tigress tooth into my throat, beneath all priceless treasure is drowning in the quicksand.

That is essentially my most recent poem.

Inspired by a poem of Claude McKay of the Harlem Renaissance.

He wrote a poem called "America."

At Morgan, about five minutes' walk from the campus, there was a movie theater in the Northwood Plaza.

Blacks could not go to that movie theater.

This was 1963.

We wanted to go to the movie theater.

We decided we were going to protest there.

Everybody got together and stood in line for tickets.

We all went with pennies.

And we counted out the cost of the theater in pennies.

So essentially we blocked anybody, and Whites didn't want to get there when we were there.

We just blocked anybody from going in there.

And police would come and lock them up.

Theyd stay in jail overnight.

Then the charges would be dismissed.

But I was afraid to go to prison.

My dad was afraid.

He would say, Earl, dont get involved with that stuff. I was amazed at the courage of these Baltimore kids.

It was nicer after they integrated.

I mean, you could go to the movies.

And I wish I had helped out with that because it was nicer for everybody.

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

I call it the Deep South.

We talk about slavery.

We talk about civil rights.

My grandfather's grandfather was the Polish slave master.

My grandfather was Freeman Hrabowski.

He was the first of that generation to be free, born slightly after the Civil War.

During my childhood, I was immersed in the civil rights movement.

So when I listened to Dr. King say, We want the children to participate in this peaceful protest, as I'm doing my algebra, I said, I want to go. And it was an empowering experience.

We were suspended from school.

It went to the federal level.

They said, put those children back in school.

I was back in my math classes, and things did change in Birmingham.

I applied to Smith and Mount Holyoke.

I was admitted to both of them and I went to Smith.

I was the only Black in my class of 45.

And in that first year, the only Black in the dorm.

I never felt discriminated again either by students and definitely not by faculty.

At Yale, absolutely no problem.

One thing I remember vividly was that the federal government outlawed segregation in public facilities.

The whole group of us got together, and we went out to lunch to celebrate the end of segregation in public facilities in Washington, DC.

Because of the civil rights movement, activities that I might have been excluded from earlier became available to me.

I mean, I didn't have to worry about where to stay in a hotel if I were traveling, and I never had a problem finding a job based on my race.

Well, one advantage of the cane is that it allows me to get book high up.

The library in Petersburg was segregated, and that worked to my advantage.

I was one of the few Blacks who used the library.

Most Blacks didn't use it.

The woman who was in charge, she just started bringing me the books down.

She said, "The White people aren't reading these books on space travel and mathematics.

You just take them."

In fact, I have some of them still at home.

You know, they've been at my home for about 65 years or so.

You know what that symbol is?

It used to be the symbol for the empty set.

My formal training is in mathematics and in theoretical physics.

I have over 350 peer-reviewed papers.

I have edited or written 21 books.

I've created at least one field, and half created another field called Nonstandard Finite Difference Schemes.

What I showed was that the standard way of doing things from my perspective is just wrong.

Most of the algorithms that are there are black box.

Ive got some equations here, I want to get a numerical solution, my question is, how do you know whether its right or not?

What happens if this is not correct?

My grandfather was very influential.

At the age of three, he used to sit down with me and we'd talk about science.

We'd talk about the stars, the heavens.

He taught me how to play various games.

I also did some personal experimentation in the house.

For example, I set the house on fire.

So that was one of the few times that I ever got a whuppin' in my life.

And in those days, a whuppin nowadays would be considered murder.

It certainly got your attention as to what you shouldnt do.

In 1954, there was a Supreme Court decision that said the schools had to be desegregated, that the schools were no longer to be of Blacks over here and White over there.

In the southern states, where desegregation was mostly enforced, what it told them, you're going to have to provide Black students the same environment, or let them come to your school.

But I wanted to go to Atlanta University because I had never seen a Black professor with a PhD in mathematics.

Whenever theres some type of social upheaval, HBCUs see an increase in applications and enrollment because a lot of the Black students feel that they won't be safe at these White campuses.

So they're looking for safe places.

There are around 103 HBCUs in the country.

I believe it's something like 40% of individuals to have a PhD in one of the STEM fields have an undergraduate degree from an HBCU.

The Black colleges do something special for Black students who want to go into the sciences and mathematics.

It gives them a little more confidence that they can do it.

I went to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and was there for four years, and I got my baccalaureate degree in mathematics.

And then I also ran into Claude B. Dansby, who was a fantastic master teach And though he never had a doctor in mathematics, nine of his students went ahead and got PhDs in mathematics.

These are all powers of X minus 0.

And so all of these are centered at zero.

I said, Well, let's do one centered at some non-zero number.

Sometime we might do that by choice.

I'm in my 20th year on the Morehouse faculty now.

It fits well with my desire to help more Black students get into mathematics.

I remember the feeling the very first day of class, walking into each class, and in each class, just a sea of young brothers.

Right now, you know this.

There's a number c that makes that true.

If they struggle, it's okay.

You know, it's challenging stuff I'm here to help you understand and make sense of it all.

Dr. Cooper and others fostered an expectation that we will all do well.

He constantly gave us examples of, This is what a Morehouse man that has a math degree does, and this is what I expect you to do. We're clear on the new thing we can conclude about.

When you're engaging in mathematics and learning mathematics, there's not a lot of immediate gratification.

This is one of the powerful things about HBCUs that my students experience: a stronger opportunity to build their identity as a mathematician.

Everything's about just math, and engaging in math, and doing math.

When I came in to Morehouse, 18 years old, I still hadn't made a choice if I was going to be an outlaw, or if I was going to go the straight and narrow, and going to be the schoolboy.

I tried to do both.

My grades and stuff started to suffer really, really, really bad.

And even though I was a complete knucklehead in their classes, they always, Zerotti, whenever you're ready to try, we'll get this thing turned around for you. And so I actually got put of out of Morehouse for a year.

This is where I grew up at.

The is called Cleveland Avenue.

Coming up right here is the Barbershop.

It's a place where we go and talk smack and get a haircut and discuss the future.

Having the rough and tough friends and family members that didn't allow things to happen to me, and so I didn't have it as bad as others.

I went away and I was supposed to come back with, Hey, I went to a community college, I got straight As, and now accept me back, Morehouse."

They said, Okay, did you do it?

And I was like, Nope, I did everything I wasnt supposed to do. And they just looked at me like, What are we supposed to do? In this case, this was raw talent.

There are a lot of faculty who will give up on students sometime.

We're not quick to give up on you.

If you're there and trying to learn, our faculty tend to be there to work with you and help you develop.

Dr. Cooper said, You know, go ask the admissions person, see what they say.

The worst they can say is no. They said, Alright, I tell you what.

If they sign off to take responsibility for you, we'll let you back in. Dr. Cooper, Dr. Brania, Dr. Wilson showed a love to me that I had never really experienced from anyone except for my mother.

Wanting to imitate them was actually what led me into a career in math.

One of the things we pride ourselves on is building community to create occasions for students to know each other and for students to know us.

Our speaker today is Kobe Lawson-Chavanu.

He reminded me he has satisfied his entire mathematics requirement.

I don't see a way we can hold him back, so on his way out the door, let's welcome Kobe Lawson-Chavan senior mathematics major.

So we want to take this high-dimensional feature layer, and we want to turn it into a 2D visualization.

That 2D visualization looks like that.

The goal of the project, then, is to just repeat this project as many times as is necessary.

We have like four or five mathematics majors that'll be graduating with me, including myself.

I would like to go to graduate school and get my master's or PhD and then work in industry in some computer science-related field.

My field is applied mathematics, dynamical systems, partial differential equations, ordinary differential equations.

I like to model things by using dynamical systems.

I also like to use computational approaches, nonstandard finite difference schemes to discretize differential equations.

From kindergarten all the way through high school, I was the only person of color in my advanced classes, and I wanted to be in a place where there were other people who looked like me in class.

And so I ended up going to Spelman College.

There I learned what it meant to a Black female professional.

Learned what it meant to be a research mathematician, because there is where I got the encouragement and real strong push to go into mathematics.

Curve should be total.

I wouldn't say there is one particular subject that came out of Spelman that sort of propelled me to study more math.

I think it was more so the visibility of the Black women that I learned from at Spelman: Yewande Olubummo Sylvia Bozeman Etta Falconer Gladys Glass Teresa Edwards Having them as teachers and role models, it meant the world to me.

I always wanted to be a runner.

I started participating in a running club, and finished my first 10K.

And that's been really exciting.

It was only after I saw topology that I really understood what I wanted to make my life's work drawing knots and links and a torus.

These were all like very new ideas for me.

So I studied all of the homeomorphisms of the torus, or the transformations of the torus to itself, that sent these curves to the right.

This is a braid group.

So the homeomorphisms of the punctured torus is actually equivalent to the three-strand braid group.

Okay, the question is how you choose these vectors.

How do you choose which ones to and which ones to throw away?

You want to start with the ones with the biggest eigenvalues.

My grandmother was Etta Falconer She's considered the 11th Black to get a PhD in mathematics.

She had a long career.

Most of that career was at Spelman College, and really worked her entire life to increase the representation of women and girls in STEM.

She gave me and us in our family a love of the challenge, right, a love of curiosity.

The first class I took was from Etta Falconer.

She had so much belief in students, and what students potential is.

Being in classes with these extremely talented Black women, and the fact that I liked mathematics anyway, that made me decide to change to math.

Dr. Falconer was kind of a disciplinarian.

When she spoke, you knew that that was what you were supposed to do.

So I had Dr. Falconer for Abstract Algebra.

Oh, she led a strict class.

We would sit up straight in that class.

We wouldn't do ... we wouldn't act up.

Etta Falconer was a phenomenal woman.

Aggressive, in terms of what she tried to do with the curriculum and with the students.

In the 1970s, when she came, Spelman College had about 10% of its students who were in the sciences and mathematics.

And she and Shirley McBay Shirley McBay was dean decided that they were going to to increase the numbers in the sciences.

By 1990, 30% of the students at Spelman were in the sciences and mathematics.

You couldn't work harder than Etta Falconer.

She outworked us all.

She was just my mentor.

The neighborhood that I lived in it had a lot of socioeconomic issues.

So I grew up in a low to middle income neighborhood, was never a great athlete or musician you know, anything like that.

But I could do math.

Math can provide a sense of control over your environment.

Choir: Children go where I send thee, how shall I send thee?

I'm gonna send thee two by two ...

I never had a Black female math teacher.

I think my students at Spelman appreciate the fact that I am a Black female, that I am interested in their success in mathematics.

We're experiencing together a common expectation of excellence.

What's exciting to me about this generation of students is that I think they're willing to call out injustice in a way that my generation perhaps didn't have to.

Now use your definition of the ideal generated by b.

What can you say then?

The ideal generated by b, which is powers of b. I first met Janiah in the spring semester of 2022.

She was in my Linear Algebra II and she's a very strong student.

She asked really detailed questions.

So were assuming that the ideals are equal?

That I want to show that a and b are associates.

She's dealt with both her course as well as independent research, so she's on top of it, really.

She just is on top in class, and she's on top of it outside of the classroom.

So my whole family are kind of musicians.

My mom, she plays the piano and she sings.

My brothers play drums, guitar, bass guitar, and all the girls are able to sing.

I love to sing a whole lot.

I think that was my first love before I got into mathematics.

So I'm a part of an ensemble on campus, and we have an original song called "I Am a Woman."

Singing: I speak my mind.

I live my truth.

I sing my song.

I am a woman.

Ooh, ooh.

The National Association of Mathematicians NAM it's a professional nonprofit or whose sole purpose is to promote excellence in scholarship, research, and teaching among underrepresented groups, in particular those of the African diaspora.

In 1969, I attended my first mathematics conference, which was the Joint Math Meetings in mathematics.

The conference had 3,600 folks registered.

And I ran into less than 25 Blacks down there.

Scott Williams and I were two of the graduate student at the time.

We went out, put flyers and told every Black we saw, Come to this meeting, come to this meeting! Otherwise, they will continue to define us the way they want to, and we won't have any say in it.

And that was the beginning of the organization thats now know as the National Association of Mathematicians.

The reason why we started the NAM was because the Whites did not want us at their meetings.

A lot of the meetings were closed to Black people.

We could not get on the program.

We were put in a jar, where we said, There's a ceiling. The chair at Howard was one of the founders of NAM, a guy named Jim Donaldson.

And he stops me in the middle of the hall, and leans down and says, You're going to the Joint Mathematics Meeting. That was my first exposure to 100 African American mathematicians.

There was a NAM session and I walked in and there's an entire room of African American mathematicians, which I had never seen, never even thought about.

And now I was a part of it.

On behalf of the programing committee of the National Association of Mathematicians, and the local organizing committee from Morgan State University, we want to welcome you to the 32nd Annual NAM Undergraduate MATHFest.

You're going to meet a lot of faculty who attended MATHFest 32 years ago, who have been attending MATHFest for many years.

You go to any university in the country, they will have in their senior class one or two African American students.

Now, notice I did not say majority institutions, HBCUs.

All of them.

When they go to a graduate school, what are they going to see when they get there?

They will be the only African American in the graduate program.

For at least one weekend, they get to see 100 African American students that are going to graduate programs.

It's the only time in their life that happens.

That was the first time I'd ever seen a Black mathematician.

And I just remember sitting there and I saw a Black mathematician, you know, speaking to me.

And then he introduced another Black mathematician.

That was a critical moment in my trajectory.

Most of the students that attend MATHFest, they have a faculty mentor who encourages them to come to MATHFest.

And that faculty mentor is usually a member of NAM and brings, essentially brings them into the fold.

As a faculty member, I run a research experience for undergraduates, so I bring my students to the MATHFest conference every year, and they actually present at that conference.

And a few years ago, my students won the first place award for research there.

I like exposing students to these environments, like they're giving them this enrichment that you don't get from classrooms.

I was able to connect with a lot of great people who gave me insight into what a math PhD look like, what grad school for a math student looks like.

Knowing that there's people like at different universities, who are wanting to pursue and learn more about math and even some of becoming math educators, is very encouraging.

It's really exciting just to see everyone come together just to enjoy math.

There are student presentations.

I think that's the heart of MATHFest is that it gives students opportunity to present their ideas and get feedback.

We have created an actual web and mobile application, to create an early warning system so that we could evaluate the users risk of contracting malaria.

We select students from around the country to come in and spend six to eight weeks to learn how to do research in mathematical biology, to address real problems.

So Janiah worked with me in my group.

Actually, she was one of the leaders of that group.

They're interested in developing an application that people can use to know their risk of acquiring malaria infection.

Janiah has been fantastic.

Initially, she was very quiet, but then she just emerged as the natural leader of that group.

We wanted to figure out how could we help prevent the spread of malaria.

The fact that there are mentors and recruiters here, it helps me understand what options are out there.

If I do go to graduate school, where would I want to go?

We're a lab that's autonomous, that kind of does more the research kind of thing.

I find somebody that may have given a talk or find somebody and just sit do and start talking to them.

I pass out my card, let them know about Delaware State University if they're interested in graduate school.

What youre already on the path towards is, towards applying mathematics that actually makes a difference in the world.

Maybe you should think about coming to Johns Hopkins.

We have lots of great programs.

He felt like it would be really if I try to come over there and learn more about biostatistics and things dealing with disease.

What I got out of it was connecting with people, networking for the first time, and that's actually where I met someone who was recruiting for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.

We started an interview process, and my group loved her, and so she starts in July.

My specific job is basically being a mathematician on the force projection team.

My job as a mathematician would just be researching, developing, and just working with the team.

I am currently a sophomore at Howard.

Coming from the small island of Bermuda, math wasnt everyones favorite topic.

But unlike them, it was my favorite one.

Since I was little, my parents will have to hide my math homework from me, before I did any other homework, because I love doing math.

I'm going to draw a point, not on that line, and we're going to connect the lines because two distinct points lie on exactly one line.

The math classes are not very large, and because of that, you can engage the students more It's easier to talk to them about problems.

It's easier to do these one on one sessions with students.

Well, I was born in Washington, DC, but I've lived in Harlem my whole life.

My mom is a jazz singer and a music teacher.

Mom busted her behind and made sure that me and my sister got the best education possible.

Dr. Davenport is the first African American male math teacher I've ever had.

That's really important to me because, you know, there's there's too many young Black kids who are told that they can't do math, and they believe that they can't do math, especially since they don't have teachers teaching them math that look like them.

Some of these students, they come to Howard partly broken, almost like a self-hatred thing.

Like, you know, oh the Black professor is the inferior one.

At Howard, my first year, I tried to dress like a Princeton or Berkeley professor.

I would come to class casually dressed with sneakers on, and I noticed the students reacted negatively to it.

One student was downright hostile.

But then a White professor, she told the class that I had been a graduate of Princeton and Berkeley.

Next day I came to class, the students had flipped, completely, following me around like a puppy dog.

So I started wearing a tie, and that made a difference.

When I graduated from high school, I got accepted to Berkeley, UCLA, all on scholarship.

I did not go to either of those places because I wanted to play basketball.

I became, as a Black man, a problem.

In the first two weeks of my time in Orange County, I was pulled over by the police ten times.

I wanted to see something else.

Howard is the mecca of Black learning.

I applied and went, not knowing anything else.

Howards a sacred place.

Judgment is lifted.

You get to experience this kind of liberation of just being yourself.

When you look at HBCUs that give PhDs, there are only three of them that do it.

The PhD program started here at Howard in '76 under Jim Donaldson.

So I was actually the third student to get a PhD at Howard in math, and the first American.

Jim Donaldson would scour these conferences and look for Black mathematician and try to bring them to Howard.

What he also did, is he went out and got mathematicians of any race that were strong.

And at that time, Howard University was the only doctoral program for math.

And the department is more pure than applied, and I appreciate that now, because they prepared me in a way that I feel like I can do any mathematics I would like to do.

When I finished, I became a full time tenure-track professor here at Morgan State.

Morgan State is one of the leading HBCU institutions that produce Black mathematician at the undergraduate level that go on to get their doctorate in mathematics.

These are my books here.

Here.

I'm very happy to be part of a team that were able to transform the department from a teaching department, into a research department, producing now PhDs with high quality work.

Every year, the country, the universities produce around five, or at most 10 Black PhDs.

We produce one to two PhDs every year.

I applied to two colleges.

One was Morgan State and the other was MIT, which I didn't get into.

Morgan had Clarence Stephens, and he had amazing ideas about learning mathematics.

Stephens encouraged us from an early age to start trying to look every month at problems that came out in the American Mathematical Monthly.

I was the only one of us at Morgan ever to solve an advanced problem.

Well, Stephens started what's called the Morgan Potsdam model for teaching.

And this model was very nurturing of students.

Three students that were under him, I had the privilege of knowing: that's Earl Barnes, Scott Williams, and Arthur Grainger.

And they were very competitive with each other.

Scott would come to class, and he'd come a few minutes late and take a bow, and he says, I'm here now.

We can get started. And I thought, I gotta do something to pull this guy down from his high horse. My mentor wanted me to take the Graduate Record Examination, and I earned a 96 percentile, and I thought I was quite good with that.

But about a month or two later, Art Grainger earned a 98th percentile.

Earl Barnes and Barbara Haskins earned a 99th percentile, and so my big head was blown, blown down.

It was a good, friendly competition.

And we all, I think, were better students, at least in mathematics, then because of ... we tried to outdo each other.

Earl Barnes was the first of us to get a doctorate in math.

He got it four years later, from University of Maryland.

He went to IBM, and he worked at the Watson Research Lab.

And when he retired from IBM, he was a professor at Georgia Tech for a number of years.

And when he retired from Georgia Tech, he became chair of the Math department at Morgan.

I think he has more papers than any of us.

As far as the eye can tell, this angle here is equal to that angle there.

Knocked the eight ball in so I lose.

So I ended up getting a hold of this book, and it had four stories in there about billiard balls.

The pool tables act like mirrors At certain angles, the thing will go around, and it's periodic.

It will come back to its starting point.

Hitting the ball at the right angle to make it go into a pocket is two hard surfaces going on each other, so there, youre working the way they should.

Anyway, thats Barnes in a nutshell.

Bob Moses stated that mathematics education is a number one civil rights issue of the 21st century.

And he was saying that because he realized that mathematics is really the gatekeeper to career opportunities.

I grew up in the neighborhood, like around Morgan State, and I went to like several summer programs at Morgan, some Saturday programs at Morgan So I had a long relationship with Morgan State, and it was really a fixture in my upbringing.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Dontae Ryan, is very conscientious and very serious about the education of Black children.

My wife and I, we're both alums of Morgan State University.

One of the things that we did was start a mentoring club, and that mentoring club was kind of like the brainchild for our company, which we call the Ryan Institute.

We have a lot of impact with a lot of students and families here in Baltimore City.

We provide resources, investing and giving back to our children so that they can see that they don't have to be victims of their circumstance, and that they can be whatever it is that they dream to be.

Mathematics is a very system-based or step-based type of problem-solving.

We started a step team at one of the schools that we service.

And we're using all of our body to make this rhythmic motion.

There's a lot of mathematics involved with dance.

How many times do you stomp your foot?

What are you doing with your arms?

We want to help students increase their self-awareness, but then also increase their confidence.

This is literally my life's work There's no greater joy than seeing a child be successful.

You can be a researcher at the university, but you can also be a researcher with Microsoft, for instance, with Facebook, with NASA, with the Air Force.

When I was hired by NSA, I was the only African American to enter NSA as a mathematician with a PhD in the subject.

By the time I left, there were 14 or 15 African Americans at NSA with PhDs in mathematics.

There's going to be an intelligence community.

There's going to be an NSA.

Who do you want to be at the NSA?

People like you, with your same values, or people who don't share your values?

But in fact, if there aren't people like you at NSA, maybe it will become exactly the animal you don't want it to become.

I was very proud of some of the stuff I did there, that gave us information about some bad things that were happening in the world.

Our goal was to have a positive impact on the mathematics community because mathematics is so important to the agency's mission.

One of the things that I did was with funding for CAARMS for many years.

Bill Massie's idea was a good one, and I found myself in a position to influence the agency to support CAARMS.

In 1995, we held the first conference for African American researchers in the mathematical sciences.

This was held at MSRI.

Just to be able to meet other Black graduate students at other institutions, meeting other African American researchers, because at your own school, there may not be any.

I didn't originate the idea of CAARMS.

I was just copying what I saw Black physicists and Black chemists do at Bell Labs.

You know, high-achieving Black scientists collectively saying, Let's leave a legacy or the next generation.

Let's do something to help create more Black scientists like us. It was so empowering to see so many Black mathematicians in one room.

David Blackwell was there.

All of these giants in math.

Miss Sylvia was there.

It was beautiful.

I didn't know what a mathematician did.

I didn't know the multitude of career options that you can do as a mathematician.

I was born and raised in New Orleans.

When Hurricane Katrina happened, I couldn't get in touch with my family in New Orleans for a very long time.

Once I did, everyone was okay.

But there was a lot of devastation at home.

One of my students created a transshipment model to model emergency evacuation strategies.

My dissertation work, when I worked with the Federal Aviation Administration, trying to figure out how many flights could land in a in inclement weather conditions I used a lot of integer programming to create an integer programming model to kind of figure out, How can I create seasons?

So at different times of the year, you might have different capacities because you have different types of weather conditions.

Math skills are needed in so many fields, and the opportunities for mathematicians in industry now, private industry.

I was at Fisk and a young man interviewed me for a job at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC.

The unit I worked with later became a unit renamed as Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories.

I can remember working there, with the new IBM big computer, and the language at the time was called SOAP.

I'll never forget that Symbolic Optimal Assembly Program.

My boss was asked to come back to Washington to be in charge of the IBM Space Computing Center.

We worked with NASA in developing programs to space satellites, first the Vanguard Project and then the Mercury Project.

I can see it right now, going home one day and telling Kurt and his family, Look up at the sky in a certain place tonight and you'll see the spaceship going by. I could tell them exactly where because we were doing the program to predict where it would be at any time.

NIST, which stands for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is under the Department of Commerce.

I was probably the first Black PhD in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Division.

We started this new project at NIST called the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, and I discovered that my research in grid generation could actually be applied to this.

So I used my grid generation techniques to design the grids for these functions.

It's a synergistic relationship between mathematicians' and biologists' work.

Biology provides rich source of interesting challenging mathematical problems across the board.

My research career is dedicated to using mathematical sciences together with data analytics and computation to understand the mechanisms for the spread and control of infectious diseases.

When you talk of diseases like influenza, or like tuberculosis or measles, now you can use mathematics to really understand what's going on.

Starting with the initial data, you can predict how many cases are likely to be generated in the next few weeks.

What would be the best containment and mitigation strategy?

Mathematics really, really played a major role in the battle against the pandemic.

I look at the geographic and spatial distribution of data and I apply it to diseases.

So the COVID pandemic has been a perfect example.

In the research that I do, I look at data that are correlated and correlated by location, and then use that information to to find out where these hotspots where these clusters, and then actually what's causing them.

For a group of undergraduates to take some data that early and was was very impressive to me.

When I chaired the National Academys Committee on Underrepresentation, we looked at the data and saw that 2.2% of the PhDs in natural sciences and engineering were going to Blacks.

We've not moved the needle in producing PhDs.

Being a Black student in mathematics is very rare at a place like Caltech, which I've always found to be ironic since Caltech is the pantheon for science, technology and mathematics.

I had a very hard time finding someone to write me a letter of recommendation for grad school.

Either the professors didn't know me, didn't respect me, or I just felt they would not have written a good letter of recommendation.

I don't know how much of that came down to race, but I can tell you I was certainly the only Black math major the whole time I was there.

So I really debated.

Do I want to have a career in this field?

This is sort of what happened to as a student, too.

You're just imported to a place, and they're like, "Good luck, have fun."

So I think paying very close attention to what sort of support a student needs to be successful is important to increase the number of underserved students.

Another part that's important is, for lack of a better way to call it, skills and drills.

There are the techniques and the skills you have to develop, and if you don't do that, you're not really going to understand what's going on.

When I first came to Spelman, we did not have the kind of classes that remediated students in math.

These students would end up in our pre-calculus course and would take the course over and over again because we had no course to support the knowledge that you needed for pre-calculus Eventually, I told my colleagues "Look, we're dream killers."

And so as a result of that, we ended up having a course for students who aren't prepared for calculus So that we usually use a capital F for that.

And a ...

There are some chang that I'm seeing to increase the numbers of Black mathematicians.

We started a program called BASE And BASE is an acronym for Black Achievement, Success and Engagement.

And it's a full scholarship for Black students to come to USF.

I have a particular involvement in MSRI-UP.

That's the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Undergraduate Program.

Each summer we bring 18 students to MSRI.

For six weeks they work under the guidance of a research leader.

The goal of this program is to broaden participation in mathematics and specifically to grow the participation of racial and ethnic minorities in mathematics to try to shift the culture of mathematics to something that is more welcoming and affirming.

Our emphasis is on research experience.

The students should be working on problems that nobody knows how to solve.

We had an opportunity to learn how to present correctly every week when we present our new findings.

Being able to create my own patterns in something that Ive always found really interesting.

I plan on joining a PhD program in either mathematics, statistics.

I want to work for the CDC.

With the new species and the zero conflict ...

I was interested in math ever since I was a kid in grade school, and my fifth grade year, when I was at Tennessee.

I would find him in his room, up late at night, just digging into different methods of doing the math problem.

By the time he got to high school, and he was dealing with some numbers that were quite foreign to me, I recognized that he had great math skills.

And, of course, he gets those math skills from his mother and not from his father.

Math was like a really safe haven for me.

Because I wasn't necessarily, like popular in high school or had a lot of friends.

So doing good in a math class gave me a place to be sure of myself.

I went to community college.

A lot of times I would be the only Black person in the class, so I ended up dropping that and became an accounting major.

A year later, I decided to go back to school and go back into math.

I think I've gotten more confident with research now.

A month out from the summer research, we all finished wrapping up a paper that we published, and it's officially, like, done.

I saw him go from the baby of the family to somebody that's always looking out for somebody else.

And then I began to see him develop more and more into a man Now I'm just really taking some time to figure out what my next plans are.

I would describe Elijah as quiet thunder.

Yes.

He has the ability to make things happen without announcing it to the world.

We still have not created a culture in our country that teaches children, particularly kids of color, to be proud when you achieve and to be willing to say, I love mathematics.

Where I grew up, there were a lot of folks where academics was not a top priority.

Working, playing sports were priorities.

There were a lot of criticisms and being made fun of for leaning in to things that were academic related.

What does it take to be good in math?

I'd say, well, the same thing it takes to be good in sports.

If you live in a community where you're willing to get up at six in the morning to practice to do basketball, then that same community shouldn't have a problem with someone who gets up at six in the morning, wants to do mathematics.

There are people from where I'm from who are just as intelligent and are just as deserving of the chance that I have, that if I don't do something, they'll never get their voice.

It's a personal mission of mine to guide them in the right direction.

Do any of you know what a mathematician does?

Oh, I got a lot of hands.

Okay.

It's going to be interesting.

Mathematician is someone that goes against another person to see who is smarter.

Okay.

Okay.

What you got?

A mathematician is somebody who gets their calculations right.

A mathematician is somebody who does math and solves math equations.

When you calculate speed ...

I actually went to this same recreation center when I was a kid.

I get a chance now to show someone that, hey, I'm just like you.

I have the same feelings that you have.

And so a lot of people in this world are going to tell you that you can't.

And I'm a person that looks like you, and I'm going to tell you that you can.

I've known Dr. Woods since we were very small.

We attended this summer camp while we were growing up.

As he was speaking with the kids some of them weren't even thinking about math.

They were thinking about sports.

Those are the things that interest them.

So making the connection of him playing sports, they see their younger selves in him.

Where I come from, going the straight and narrow was not always cool, and so I didn't go straight and narrow all the time.

I have a mugshot, right?

That story tells people who feel like they have to give up that they don't have to.

I want to make sure that I am a beacon of that light, right.

To basically say, look, it's not about what you done.

It's about what you finna do.

It's not about what you did in the past.

It's what you about to do in the future.

You'd be surprised as to how how powerful that is.

I really, really enjoy interacting with young people.

There's just enormous opportunities for them to solve some of the biggest problems that we have not been able to solve.

You know, they can learn from our mistakes and try to build a much better future.

As African Americans, it can be tough in this society.

Resilience is our middle name.

We may get knocked down, there might be people that try to put barriers in our way, but we will rise.

The issue is not what is possible, what is available.

The issue is what do you want to and what are you willing to commit yourself to do?

Not achieving the first dream you try that's not a tragedy.

The tragedy is not dreaming at all.