Evelyn Boyd Granville, Mathematician & Pioneer in Computing

When society places limitations and marginalizes minorities, we must work tirelessly to break those ideals and overcome obstacles, which is exactly what Evelyn Boyd Granville did. Evelyn Boyd Granville was born on May 1, 1924 in a segregated Washington D.C. She was passionate about school and constantly took advantage of the resources around her like libraries and museums. Granville was the second child of William and Julia Walker Boyd. Her father worked as a janitor, chauffeur, and messenger, and her mother worked as a currency and stamp examiner at the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The Great Depression caused her parents to separate, and so Evelyn and her older sister lived with their mother and aunt.

Boyd was salutatorian at her junior high school and graduated as valedictorian from the prestigious Dunbar High School. It was academically oriented towards black students with the goal to send their students to top universities and colleges. Faculty and teachers at Boyd’s high school were aware of her academic intelligence and encouraged her to continue her studies after high school and transgress societal boundaries.

Boyd was accepted into Smith College but did not think she would be able to attend because of her family’s financial position. A few months later, her aunt and mother gave her $500 for her studies, and she received scholarships and financial aid that eventually allowed her to study at Smith College. She enrolled at Smith in 1941 and grew passionate about mathematics, theoretical physics, and astronomy. During the summer, she would go back to Washington, D.C. and work at the National Bureau of Standards as a technical aid, then a computer analyst, and lastly a mathematician. During college, she lived in a cooperative house and shared chores rather than paying for the expensive dorms. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1945. Although she considered becoming a teacher multiple times throughout her college career, she chose to focus on industrial work in the physics or mathematics field.

After graduation, Boyd was awarded a scholarship from the Smith Students’ Aid Society of Smith College to fund undertaking her doctorate. She was offered a position at Yale University and along with the Rosenwald fellowship she had enough financial support to attend. At Yale, Boyd began research in functional analysis and wrote a doctoral thesis on the Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain. She was awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the Atomic Energy Commission and graduated from Yale in 1956 with a Ph.D. in mathematics, making her the second African American woman to receive a Ph.D from an American university.

After Yale, Boyd spent a postdoctoral year at the New York University Institute of Mathematics working on differential equations. She accepted an offer to become an associate professor at Fisk University in Nashville from 1950 to 1952. She taught two students, Vivienne Malone Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer who became, respectively, the seventh and eleventh African American women to receive Ph.D.’s in mathematics. In 1952, Boyd continued working on missile fuses at the National Bureau of Standards. In December, she left the National Bureau of Standards to write programs for the IBM 650 computer. In 1957, Boyd moved to New York City to work as a consultant on numerical analysis at the New York City Data Processing Center, where she learned a computer language called SOAP. NASA contracted IBM to write software, so Granville was considered a part of the team of IBM mathematicians. Boyd did not like living in New York City, so she moved back to Washington, D.C. to work on a contract with NASA in its Vanguard Computer Center.

In 1960, during Boyd’s vacation in southern California, she met her future husband at a community church, and soon the two married and moved to his home in California in 1960. From 1960 to1961, she computed the calculations for space trajectories at the Computation and Data Reduction Center of Space Technology Laboratories. In 1962, Boyd worked on celestial mechanics, trajectory, and orbit computation as a research specialist for the space and information systems division of the North America Aviation Company. Granville was able to constantly change jobs to experience the most interesting and best-paying experience.

In 1967, was a turning point for Boyd. She divorced her husband and changed her career from working with NASA to academia. NASA had cut back on its funding, which conflicted with her passion to work with the space projects, so she became an assistant professor of mathematics at California State University in Los Angeles where she taught computer programming and numerical analysis. Here, Boyd required that math be taught to prospective elementary school teachers. She taught second and fifth-grade mathematics part-time and evening classes at the University of Southern California.

She remarried Edward V. Granville, in 1970. Boyd taught at USC and retired in 1984 from her work as a full-time professor. After retiring, she and her husband moved to Texas where she began teaching eighth-grade mathematics, high school algebra, and computer literacy at the Van Independent School District. Boyd left the job three months later as she found it difficult to teach high school students. So, from 1985 to 1988 she taught computer science at a predominantly black school called Texas College. She continued to teach until her retirement in 1997. While in Texas, Boyd and her husband sold eggs from their chicken farm. They had a chicken farm together with almost 800 chickens!

After academia, research, and tireless work, she continued to travel across the country to speak about the importance of math and learning. She even delivered an address to Yale in 2000. Boyd broke the stereotypical image crafted by those who underestimate women, especially minorities and she has stated, “I always smile when I hear that women cannot excel in mathematics.” She continues to change the way people view the STEAM fields and proves those who neglect the power and influence of education wrong, once writing, “We accepted education as the means to rise above the limitations that a prejudiced society endeavored to place upon us.” Boyd’s life was packed with experiences and challenges, and she is truly an inspiration for those interested in pursuing a path in math, physics, or astronomy.

by Kelly Nguyen

References

“Evelyn Boyd Granville.” Encyclopedia.com. 27 Jul. 2020. Retrived from www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-miscellaneous-biographies/evelyn-boyd-granville

“Evelyn Boyd Granville — Biography.” University of St. Andrews School of Mathematics and Statistics. Oct. 2001. Retrieved from https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Granville/

“Evelyn Boyd Granville.” Mathematically Gifted & Black. Retrieved from mathematicallygiftedandblack.com/honorees/evelyn-boyd-granville/

Gregersen, Erik. “Evelyn Granville.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Evelyn-Granville.

Lamb, Evelyn. “Mathematics, Live: A Conversation with Evelyn Boyd Granville.” Scientific American. 5 Sept. 2014. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/mathematics-live-a-conversation-with-evelyn-boyd-granville/

“Unsung: Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville.” Undark. Retrieved from https://undark.org/2016/06/13/unsung-african-american-contributions-mathematics/