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Evelyn Boyd Granville Born: May 1, 1924 Birthplace: Washington, D.C. |
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Granville was born in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 1924. Her father, William Boyd, worked as a custodian in their apartment building; he did not stay with the family, however, and Granville was raised by her mother, Julia Walker Boyd, and her mother's twin sister, Louise Walker, both of whom worked as examiners for the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Granville and her sister Doris, who was a year and a half older, often spent portions of their summers at the farm of a family friend in Linden, Virginia.
Evelyn Boyd grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended the segregated Dunbar High School (from which she graduated as valedictorian) maintained high academic standards. Several of its faculty held degrees from top colleges, and they encouraged the students to pursue ambitious goals. Granville's mathematics teachers included Ulysses Basset, a Yale graduate, and Mary Cromwell, a University of Pennsylvania graduate; Cromwell's sister, who held a doctorate from Yale, taught in Dunbar's English department.
Inspired by her high school teachers and with the encouragement of her family and teachers, Granville entered Smith College with a small partial scholarship from Phi Delta Kappa, a national sorority for black women. During the summers, she returned to Washington to work at the National Bureau of Standards. After her freshman year, she lived in a cooperative house at Smith, sharing chores rather than paying more expensive dormitory rates. Granville majored in mathematics and physics, but was also fascinated by astronomy after taking a class from Marjorie Williams. She considered becoming an astronomer, but chose not to commit herself to living in the isolation of a major observatory, which was necessary for astronomers of that time. Though she had entered college intending to become a teacher, she began to consider industrial work in physics or mathematics. She graduated summa cum laude in 1945 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
With help from a Smith College fellowship, Granville began graduate studies at Yale University, for which she also received financial assistance. She earned an M.A. in mathematics and physics in one year, and began working toward a doctorate at Yale. For the next two years she received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which was awarded to help promising black Americans develop their research potential. The following year she received an Atomic Energy Commission Predoctoral Fellowship. Granville's doctoral work concentrated on functional analysis, and her dissertation was titled On Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain. Her advisor, Einar Hille, was a former president of the American Mathematical Society. Upon receiving her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949, Granville was elected to the scientific honorary society Sigma Xi.
This was second year an African American woman received a Ph. D. in Mathematics was 1949 (the first was 1943 when Euphemia Lofton-Haynes earned a Ph.D.). That same year, Marjorie Lee Browne finished her Ph.D. thesis at the University of Michigan, but was not awarded the degree until February of the next year,1950.
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Granville then undertook a year of postdoctoral research at New York University's Institute of Mathematics and Science. Apparently because of housing discrimination, she was unable to find an apartment in New York, so she moved in with a friend of her mother. Despite attending segregated schools, Granville had not encountered discrimination based on race or gender in her professional preparation. Only years later would she learn that her 1950 application for a teaching position at a college in New York City was turned down for such a reason. A female adjunct faculty member eventually told biographer Patricia Kenschaft that the application was rejected because of Granville's race; however, a male mathematician reported that despite the faculty's support of the application, the dean rejected it because Granville was a woman. In 1950, Granville accepted the position of associate professor of mathematics at Fisk University, a noted black college in Nashville, Tennessee. At Fisk, Boyd she taught two students, Vivienne Malone Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer, who would be, respectively, the seventh and eleventh, African American women to receive Ph.D.'s in Mathematics. |
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After two years of teaching, Granville went to work for the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories as an applied mathematician, a position she held for four years. From 1956 to 1960, she worked for IBM on the Project Vanguard and Project Mercury space programs, analyzing orbits and developing computer procedures. Her job included making "real-time" calculations during satellite launchings. "That was exciting, as I look back, to be a part of the space programs--a very small part--at the very beginning of U.S. involvement," Granville told Loretta Hall in a 1994 interview.
On a summer vacation to southern California, Granville met the Reverend Gamaliel Mansfield Collins, a minister in the community church. They were married in 1960, and made their home in Los Angeles. They had no children, although Collins's three children occasionally lived with them. In 1967, the marriage ended in divorce.
Upon moving to Los Angeles, Granville had taken a job at the
Computation and Data Reduction Center of the U.S. Space Technology
Laboratories, studying rocket trajectories and methods of orbit
computation. In 1962, she became a research specialist at the
North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division,
working on celestial mechanics, trajectory and orbit computation,
numerical analysis, and digital computer techniques for the Apollo
program. The following year she returned to IBM as a senior mathematician.
Because of restructuring at IBM, numerous employees were transferred
out of the Los Angeles area in 1967; Granville wanted to stay,
however, so she applied for a teaching position at California
State University in Los Angeles. She happily reentered the teaching
profession, which she found enjoyable and rewarding. She was disappointed
in the mathematics preparedness of her students, however, and
she began working to improve mathematics education at all levels.
She taught an elementary school supplemental mathematics program
in 1968 and 1969 through the State of California Miller Mathematics
Improvement Program. The following year she directed a mathematics
enrichment program that provided after-school classes for kindergarten
through fifth grade students, and she taught grades two through
five herself. She was an educator at a National Science Foundation
Institute for Secondary Teachers of Mathematics summer program
at the University of Southern California in 1972. Along with colleague
Jason Frand, Granville wrote Theory and Application of Mathematics
for Teachers in 1975; a second edition was published in 1978,
and the textbook was used at over fifty colleges.
In 1970, Granville married Edward V. Granville, a real estate broker. After her 1984 retirement from California State University in Los Angeles, they moved to a sixteen-acre farm in Texas, where they sold eggs produced by their eight hundred chickens.
From 1985 to 1988, Granville taught mathematics and computer science at Texas College in Tyler. In 1990, she accepted an appointment to the Sam A. Lindsey Chair at the University of Texas at Tyler, and in subsequent years continued teaching there as a visiting professor. Smith College awarded Granville an honorary doctorate in 1989, making her the first black woman mathematician to receive such an honor from an American institution.
Throughout her career Granville shared her energy with a variety of professional and service organizations and boards. Many of them, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Association of University Women, focused on education and mathematics. Others, such as the U.S. Civil Service Panel of Examiners of the Department of Commerce and the Psychology Examining Committee of the Board of Medical Examiners of the State of California, reflected broader civic interests.
When asked to summarize her major accomplishments, Granville told Hall, "First of all, showing that women can do mathematics." Then she added, "Being an African American woman, letting people know that we have brains too."
Most important is her biography, My Life as a Mathematician by Eveyln Boyd Granville, which can be read on Agnes Scott College's "Women in Mathematics" website.
References: [Giles], [Granville], [Kenschaft1981], [Kenschaft1987], [Kenschaft1993]
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A.B. Mathematics
(1945) Smith College; M.A. Mathematics (1946) Yale University
Ph.D. Mathematics
(1949) Yale University
