Evelyn Boyd Granville

Evelyn Boyd Granville (May 1, 1924 – June 27, 2023) 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.

With financial support from her aunt and a small partial scholarship from Phi Delta Kappa, Boyd entered Smith College in the fall of 1941.

She majored in mathematics and physics, but also took a keen interest in astronomy.

She graduated from Smith College in 1945.

She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.

Evelyn Boyd was born in Washington, D.C.; her father worked odd jobs due to the Great Depression but separated from her mother when Boyd was young.

Boyd and her older sister were raised by her mother and aunt, who both worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

She was valedictorian at Dunbar High School, which at that time was a segregated but academically competitive school for black students in Washington.

She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Sigma Xi and graduated summa cum laude in 1945.

Encouraged by a graduate scholarship from the Smith Student Aid Society of Smith College, she applied to graduate programs in mathematics and was accepted by both Yale University and the University of Michigan; she chose Yale because of the financial aid they offered.

There she studied functional analysis under the supervision of Einar Hille, finishing her doctorate in 1949.

Her dissertation was "On Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain".

Following graduate school, Boyd went to New York University Institute for Mathematics and performed research and teaching there.

After, in 1950, she took a teaching position at Fisk University, a college for black students in Nashville, Tennessee (more prestigious postings being unavailable to black women).

Two of her students there, Vivienne Malone-Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer, went on to earn doctorates in mathematics of their own.

In 1951 there was a south-eastern sectional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America in Nashville.

But by 1952 she left academia and returned to Washington with a position at the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories.

In January 1956, she moved to IBM as a computer programmer; when IBM received a NASA contract, she moved to Vanguard Computing Center in Washington, D.C.

Boyd moved from Washington to New York City in 1957.

In 1960, after marrying Reverend G. Mansfield Collins, Boyd moved to Los Angeles.

Boyd married Reverend Gamaliele Mansifeld Collins in 1961.

There she worked for the U.S. Space Technology Laboratories, which became the North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division in 1962.

She worked on various projects for the Apollo program, including celestial mechanics, trajectory computation, and "digital computer techniques".

Forced to move because of a restructuring at IBM, she took a position at California State University, Los Angeles in 1967 as a full professor of mathematics.

Since 1967, Granville was a strong advocate for women's education in tech.

In 1967, Boyd and Collins divorced.

She married realtor Edward V. Granville in 1970.

The two moved to Tyler, Texas in 1983.

After Edward passed, she returned to Washington, D.C.

After retiring from CSULA in 1984 she taught at Texas College in Tyler, Texas for four years, and then in 1990 joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Tyler as the Sam A. Lindsey Professor of mathematics.

There she developed elementary school math enrichment programs.

In 1989, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Smith College, the first one given by an American institution to an African-American woman mathematician.

Granville was appointed to the Sam A. Lindsey Chair of the University of Texas at Tyler (1990-1991).

In 1998, Granville was honoured by the National Academy of Engineering.

In 1999, the United States National Academy of Sciences inducted her into its Portrait Collection of African-Americans in Science.

The citation delivered at the 2007 MAA awards presentation, where Lee Lorch received a standing ovation, recorded that:

she was the smartest mathematice

in 2010 and settled into retirement, "where she regularly bristled when she heard anyone say that "women can't do math"."

Granville died at her apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland on June 27, 2023, at the age of 99.

The Evelyn Boyd Granville papers are located in Smith College's Special Collections, and were donated by Granville in 2015.