What is the method for this particular problem?

There's something precise and methodical about solving a mathematics problem, and that's what makes it beautiful.

My favorite shape is a square.

I love the square.

It█s got four perfect angles, four perfect sides.

It's my favorite shape.

I love a square.

I am a square.

I'm a square, I'm a square.

I tell everybody that.

I'm a square.

My name is Nathaniel Whitaker, and I'm a mathematician.

My name is Keisha Cook, and I am a mathematician.

I am Chartese Jones, and I am a mathematician.

My name is Talithia Williams, and I am a mathematician.

When I saw the difference between math and the other disciplines, it's only in math that I felt I can be myself, nothing else.

I like to count my Pisces tattoo as a math tattoo in the sense that not only is it I mean, come on, Pi-sces, but if you look at the Pisces symbol and you cut off half of it, there's actually a little Pi hidden in there.

And I always point this out to say that it was written in the stars that I was going to be a mathematician.

But what motivates me is where I saw things at the beginning.

I saw segregation.

To know where you came from is important.

Why are things the way they are around you?

If you don't know your history, you don't know that.

I was born in Ahoskie, North Carolina.

My parents were sharecroppers, and their parents were sharecroppers.

There was segregation everywhere.

And I remember even at the age of five years old, my father every Sunday took us to the drive-in theater where there was a big fence down the middle, and the fence separated Colored and White.

By going to Black schools at the beginning, one thing I think I had is self-esteem.

Even if somebody didn't necessarily think that I could do something, I felt like they had engraved into me that nobody knows the measure of me.

I'm originally from Jackson, Mississippi, where I grew up in a segregated public school system.

At that time, in the late █60s, people like myself, if they were to go to college, then they would most likely go out of state.

Then integration afforded opportunities for me to look within my state of Mississippi, and I visited the University of Mississippi.

And I ended up entering there as a freshman.

I went to the Department of Mathematics to declare that I wanted to be a math major.

And I remember walking into the chairman's office and being stopped by his secretary and asked what was I here for and what did I want?

And I told them that I wanted to be a math major.

And I couldn't wait for the jubilation to to start.

They█d have another math major.

And she just simply looked at me and said, “You can't be no math major.” I gathered with the other few students who were there.

We formed the Black Student Unio and we began to protest.

So because of those protests, I was dismissed from the university.

That was a sad time in my life.

I was relegated to working in the steel mills in Indiana.

And one day I received a letter from a historically Black college and university, Tougaloo College: “If you would like to come to school here, you are welcomed.” It was as if I had struck gold.

It motivated me to study math a lot more in detail.

I finally finished my master's degree at the University of Michigan.

After graduating, I found myself in New York at Buffalo.

I ended up transferring back to the University of Mississippi, and that's where I completed my PhD.

I wasn't a villain anymore.

It took a long time, if you will, to to accept that.

Upon graduating, I went to work for an aerospace company.

It was called General Dynamics and the production was the F-16, and I was the mathematician on the project.

1993, I returned to the University of Mississippi as a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and as assistant dean in the Graduate School.

I began recruiting faculty members of color.

This became one of my passions.

If you grow up like that, one of the messages is that there are people who don't like you.

And they don't like you, not because of anything you do, and not because of the way that you look, but because you're different from them.

This is something Albert Einstein has actually talked about.

He once made the statement that racism is a disease of White people, because he understood how racism worked from his experience in Germany.

Being aware of that allows one to negotiate appropriately, to try to reach one█s goal with a minimum of psychological damage.

We had an elementary school.

I went first to fifth grade in, what was then traditional for Black communities, a one-room schoolhouse.

The building was a Rosenwald school.

There were many of those, probably over 400 across the South.

They were schools designed to provide education for Black students, and they came from a partnership between Rosenwald, who was the Sears executive, and Booker T. Washington, who was then president of Tuskegee Institute.

I had wonderful Black teachers.

The registrar gave several of us scholarships to come to Alabama A&M, and that's where I met my husband.

Freshman year we started off in college algebra, so we were in the same college algebra class.

She needed an escort for the ball, so that was my introduction to Sylvia Trimble.

We graduated one week and we married the next week.

Bozeman taught at Morehouse and Sylvia taught at Spelman.

And they were two very important people driving at some of the two best schools for African American in the country.

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee.

We used to say “May-emphis, Tennessee.” My parents had 13 children, seven boys and six girls, and I was number six.

We had a large peach tree, and I loved peaches, so they called me Peaches.

At that time in the 1940s, █50s, Memphis was segregated.

Black people tended to stay in Black neighborhoods.

I was walking down the street one day and a White gentleman was coming toward me this way.

And as we got closer, he looked at me in the eye and he did this, I knew that meant I needed to cross the street.

I did go in 1964 to Mount Saint Scholastica College, an all girls Catholic school in Atchison, Kansas.

I came to Ohio State University in 1970, and I worked until 1984 and I got my degree.

Cal State San Marcos was going to be a new 20th campus in the California State University system.

I chaired the math department for four years.

I had been at White schools all the time.

I wanted to take that knowledge in a school that was all Black.

Lincoln University had been founded by slaves who were soldiers.

They wanted to teach other Black people to read.

2005, I became the president of Lincoln University.

The blessing of not knowing has been a blessing all my life.

The people who get lost the quickest are the ones who think they know.

But everybody just got here.

Nobody is a thousand years old.

Even if they are, they still don't know that much.

My dad used to multiply four-, five-digit numbers in his head.

And people just come around the house to see him do it.

They bet on him.

Nobody could beat him playing checkers.

He had a third-grade education.

I was born just outside of Selma, Alabama.

My parents moved up to Detroit when I was six months old.

We called the east side of Detroit.

The most we were looking for was a job in the factory.

Automation was beginning to let us know that the future wasn't going to look too good as a factory worker, so my brother and I decided we were going to college.

It turns out we're the only two that went to college in our neighborhood.

Being a Black person, we had no information in our culture about things like mathematics and physics.

But we had plenty of information about boxing and understanding about football and basketball.

My problem was I didn't know what knowing was, and I was in a situation where everybody walked around like they knew.

I had to ask myself, “What does it mean to know?” See?

Cause I already knew I didn't know.

I studied on the bus.

I studied walking down the street.

When I got time to have lunch at the job, I opened up the book and studied.

I called it intellectual push-ups.

If you want to be good at something, find the best and study them.

So I chose Von Neumann because he was both a an analyst and interested in theoretical mathematical physics.

And he became my model and my advisor.

What he was doing was trying to construct infinite dimensional mathematical systems, and that was an open problem.

I made the first step in 1976.

I constructed infinite tensor products of Banach spaces.

Richard Feynman gave a talk on a particular application which, which looked like something I was doing, and it turned out that my theorem was right.

It took me about 20 years to completely do it, namely the construction of the Feynman operator calculus, which Feynman used to solve the problems in quantum electrodynamics.

I consider myself blessed.

I'm still healthy on the inside.

I still love mathematics.

I still love to teach.

I don't hate nobody.

I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia.

My family owned a grocery store, and so at an early age, I ended up being a clerk in the store.

So math was already a part of my existence.

I was sent to a school in a White neighborhood.

I didn't really have a lot of people encouraging me, so I ended up majoring in mathematics at the College of William and Mary.

One day in the mail, I get this letter saying, “Welcome to the PhD program in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Old Dominion University.” I did my master's thesis in commutative algebra.

I was sitting in class one day and I said, just out loud, “What is this stuff good for?” I really liked computer science, so I decided, maybe I'll think about that.

At NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they decided they would hire me in 1989, and I've been there ever since.

I█ve done a lot of outreach work.

For over 15 years, I ran a tutoring program in Virginia.

One of the early years I had two third graders, and I hear one of the third graders say to the other, “The White man█s not going to let the Black man get anywhere.” And I'm like, they█re in the third grade, where do they even get this from?

As a young kid, I got used to manipulating numbers and statistics and baseball statistics like that.

That█s what I thought math was— it was about numbers.

And then I .

.

.

Boy was I shocked to learn that it█s not at all what it's about.

Alice was segregated in those days, and so we went to a two-room schoolhouse four grades per room.

So when I came into the class knowing how to read, they moved me from grade one to grade three.

After Carver Elementary, Brown v. Board was decided, and fortunately Alice decided to desegregate.

And I went to Rice the summer of 1963 expecting to be a student, except that when they announced that the trustees were going to break William Marsh Rice's will, which had said it was limited to White citizens of Texas, two alumni sued to stop the Blacks.

One massive donor had in the writing said that if you bring in African American students, I'm cutting off the money.

And there was a battle over that they're saying “You can't refuse.

Legally, you're going to have to do this.” That's how I ended up being the first African American to graduate from Rice.

When we first came to Rice that summer, I had gotten two roommates, and we got an apartment on the south side of campus.

One of the managers came to see me and said, “You know, there█s been some complaints.” “So what█s the problem?” He said, “Your Black friend.” I said, “Oh, but what about me?” “Oh, you█re okay.

You█re a Puerto Rican.” And the same thing happened a day later with the other manager, except that he said I was a Hindu.

So, as I say, that's how I temporarily became the only Hindu Puerto Rican in the world.

I came to Maryland in the fall of 1968.

That's when I started teaching.

As I said, there just weren█t that many African Americans in anything.

He was the first African America chair of the department.

He was also the only African American faculty member.

He brought in students that he got from around the country.

At one point, there had been over 25 of us in the program there.

And so that's when Dr. Johnson would hold these monthly meetings to kind of make sure we were working together, that we were doing okay in our classes.

If he hadn█t been there, I know a number of us would not have graduated.

It was a family.

It was a community.

And it was because of Dr. Johnson.

He stayed in touch.

He kept us connected.

He did not let us get isolated or siloed.

We would meet with him pretty regularly.

We would discuss whatever issues, whatever difficulties we were having, and we knew that he would help us get to a solution.

The highlight of my life was in 2012 I received the PAESMEM award, which is the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

We were the first three Black women to get a PhD from Maryland in the mathematical sciences.

When we were applying to put in all our paperwork to graduate in the graduate office, she said, “This might be the first time we graduating a Black woman.” I said, “When was the first time you all graduated a Black man?” She█s like, “Uh, I think that was 1969.” I said, “Hmm, and this is 1999.” We just had no idea the significance and the the amount of attention and the amount of publicity that we would get.

We were interviewed by the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, BET, NPR.

And what was so cool is that my focus was applied math; Kim, her focus was statistics; and then Sherry Scott, her focus was on pure mathematics.

So it was like we covered all of the bases of math.

My mother said to me, “If you go to a PWI, you'll be a number and not a name.

You'll just be boosting their minority, you know, population.

That's all they care about is the fact that, yep, we got one more.” 1969 was the year that most majority institutions decided it was okay for people like me to come and study there— partially as a result of the civil rights movement.

It was the first time MIT admitted more than a handful of African Americans in an entering class, and there were 50 of us in my class.

The campus had never experienced this number of people of color.

The N-word was tossed around even on campus.

One of the things that we discussed was when you get your PhD, what do you do with it?

A number of people said you immediately go to a historically Black college and bring the things that you've learned with you.

I was one of the people said no, that's not what you do.

What you do is you enter into a majority institution.

You pursue being a successful faculty member.

And then you perhaps, if you have the opportunity and the desire, you go to a historically Black college.

At Bucknell, I was the only African American in all of my classes, and that made it very difficult to find people to study with.

I was at a PWI on an all-White campus, and it was only 50 African Americans out of 4,000 students.

I had to learn how to put myself out there to make myself known for being good.

I recall going to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, being the only Black student in the six-story science complex my first year.

There was a very nurturing cleaning lady and she was very supportive.

“How are you doing?

Good to see you.

Do your work.” I don█t know what to show about that, but .

.

.

Excuse me, but, but that helped me get through.

My first semester in college I had registered for an honors- level calc one course.

The professor came in on the first day of class and and immediately asked the question, who in here had never had calculus before?

And the only hands to be raised were mine and the one other African American student in the room.

And the professor proceeded to point out the two of us and say, “Just the two of you?

Then you should consider dropping down to the regular calculus course, because this is an honors class, and you probably won't be able to keep up.” That's the first day, first 15 minutes of the class.

And I looked at the other student, the other student looked at me, and we both had this unspoken agreement that there was no way we were going to drop out of this class.

There were professors who said if they had anything to do with it, a Black would never get a PhD in mathematics in that university.

In fact, there were some professors at Purdue who said that.

But there were also some who said, “If you come here and perform well, we will assist you.” Ever since I had been at Purdue, students had been protesting.

They demanded that the university get a Black study organization.

You had 100 students out there with bricks in their hand, not saying anything, not doing anything.

Unless we get an audience with you, we will demand your attention.

The Black Cultural Center has been indispensable.

This is a place where they can come and actually learn about Black history and history in general.

If you look around, you can see all of the people that they've invited over the years.

Students today have little memory of who the real heroes are in mathematics.

Knowing and seeing all of us will give them some hope.

This award was established by the Purdue Alumni Association in 1981 to recognize and honor to recognize and honor special people who have contributed significantly to the educational experience for a substantial number of Purdue students.

I came in 1979, so my 44th year.

It was very, very hard.

I could walk around campus for a whole week not see another Black person.

If that situation were now, I don't know if I would stay here.

I remember the very first day I taught a class as a graduate student, and as soon as I walked in, this one student looked at me, got up, and walked out.

I grew up in South Los Angeles.

At the time, we called it South Central Los Angeles.

2004, I got a position at Purdue University and was there for 14 years.

You can't be a Black man in America and not know about the history of racism in Indiana, so I was very aware, eyes wide open, knowing that I was going to see lots and lots of Confederate flags.

Black faculty have a catch-22.

On the one hand, you are going to be questioned by students who are going to say maybe this person doesn't know what they're talking about.

But on the other hand, If you make it too difficult, they're going to say that you're a bad teacher.

You can't explain things well.

They don't understand what you're talking about.

You're kind of caught in a very awkward position.

And I'll tell you that I've been in this academics game for almost 30 years.

I don't know the right balance.

At the University of Connecticut, people kept asking me what country I was from.

What are y'all talking about?

Do I talk funny?

You know, I say “I'm from Indiana.

Why are you asking me the country?” And I couldn't figure it out.

Eventually, I learned that I was the first US Black to come into the program, and I didn't quite put the two and two together that people looked at me, they said, “She█s a .

.

.

She█s not White, so she must be from another country.” The idea that simply because you were born with a little bit more melanin, you are incapable of some things, we all know it's crazy.

Most people who look at me don't necessarily guess that I'm not White.

When I was in graduate school, I was called into a meeting with the director of graduate studies.

He told me that the fellowship that I had was for minorities, and then asked me, “Are you a minority?” I felt as though I was being asked to justify myself.

I was being accused of dishonesty.

There are barriers around feeling incapable, about feeling out of place, about feeling that one is doing something relevant.

Depending on someone's path in life, they can download malware basically.

And for African Americans, this malware includes the message that mathematics isn't really your stuff, that you're not supposed to be good at this.

And if you are, you are some sort of an exception.

And these kinds of pieces of malware sit inside of people's heads.

Those inner voices sort of start to tell you that you don't belong in a space, especially when you don't see yourself represented.

Imposter syndrome comes up throughout your professional career in very small ways, and I think you just have to remind yourself that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

There is no mistake about that.

People can identify in multiple axes of difference simultaneously.

I can represent Black or African mathematicians and LGBT mathematicians.

So I think that█s why, sort of what do they call it, I█m a twofer.

One of the things that I did as dean and even department head is community building and having people feel like they belong, being welcomed.

Even when people come to the university the first time and they sit in a class and they have 100 or 200 people, a lot of times they decide whether you're going to stay in the university the first two or three weeks.

A Black student that's not part of the community is going to have a hard time succeeding.

We drew the region.

Okay, so the region for us in the last problem was Y was equal to the square root of X.

So we drew that, the line.

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.

.

Trying to get people to understand the love of mathematics is difficult.

Even knowing that they can do math, they're still afraid of being a mathematics major.

My first experience in loving mathematics really was somewhere around first grade.

I loved numbers.

I loved putting them together.

I loved seeing things.

For example, one of the things that just made me super excited was when the time was 12:34 in the middle of the afternoon, because it read 1, 2, 3, 4.

And I decided literally in seventh grade that when I went to college, I was going to be a mathematics major.

I decided to go to Northwestern, and I graduated from there in 1994 with a PhD in engineering sciences and applied mathematics.

Not only was I the only African American student in the program, I was the only mother in the program.

I could not be the person at the bottom of the class because that meant African Americans couldn't do it.

Next thing I know, I am buying a house in Dover, Delaware, and becoming a faculty member at Delaware State University.

And I've been here almost 19 years.

I have had three doctoral students, and each one of the doctoral students has solved a problem that did not have a solution.

If you continue to work through it, you will end up at the other side.

It's like swimming across the pool.

If you stop in the middle, you drown.

But once you keep going to the other side, you've reached the other side, and there's the solution.

I used to teach classes at the 300 level and I had 10 students.

Now I have two or three.

That steady stream of people that are interested in mathematics has decreased.

We don't know why.

We have found that a lot of other institutions are having the same issue.

We can think of data science with a goal in mind: the goal of extracting something useful from a data set— either numbers, text, images, whatever.

My current role is director of the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative.

What we're looking at to do is develop new data science that addresses issues of race and bias, you know, across data science and its affiliates.

We'll call it artificial intelligence, machine learning, cyber, quantum.

If we look at math and statistics degrees, the US population as a whole, Blacks account for about 13.4%.

But if we look at the trend lines in math, it's going down as far as degree attainment.

So these are the slides that keep me up at night.

This is always going to be equal to zero whether X goes to plus infinity or minus infinity.

I try to create an environment that's different from the one that I experienced as a student.

I try to create an environment where my students feel seen and supported.

You kind of know if your instructor doesn't believe that you're a strong student.

This is something that anyone can do, anyone can be successful at, at any level.

With the right support that barrier is removed.

One of the most emotional experiences that you can have is doing mathematics, doing mathematics research.

And when you have success, the joy and the happiness can be really exhilarating.

So we've got these people around the country in mathematics who are making a difference, but who understand how important it is to be ambassadors for math, to get out into the schools or to colleges and to say, “I am a mathematician, I am in statistics.” Dr. Talithia Williams is a great example of an ambassador.

As a kid, I've always loved information that I could get from data and the stories that could be told with numbers.

We have all these sports figures.

Our kids wake up and they look at them and they think, that's what I want to be, that's what I can do.

Why not have posters of great physicists or mathematicians or data scientists where our kids can wake up and say, “this is who I can be?” Find out about other people, other adults, and what their lives were like.

What was the pattern of their lives?

What were they like when they were your age?

What did they think?

What did they do?

We were looking for a way to have an impact, or to stimulate K-12 students to like more mathematics.

Today we are going to be talking about Dorothy Vaughan.

Dorothy Vaughan was an American mathematician and human computer who worked for NASA.

The project that they're working on is finding a mathematician of color and learning a little bit about them— some historical information.

Presenting Scott W. Williams.

He wanted to go to a specific school he didn't get into.

He still didn't give up on what he wanted to do.

And he did that while still having, you know, the struggle of being a Black man.

I usually don't get what I want, even if I work hard.

And you know, even though he didn't get what he wanted, he still tried.

They exceeded our expectations.

They created beautiful posters.

Almost 100% of the students are at poverty level.

We have a large population of homeless and foster youth.

Last year we had a 100% graduation rate; 97% went to college.

This will give them some confidence and strength that with mathematics they can achieve something for themself.

David Blackwell, born April 24th, 1919, Centralia, Illinois, started his own foundation to help queuing systems.

He loved math, I love math.

It█s kind of like my favorite subject.

This is a picture of me with one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics, David Blackwell.

He was a statistician, but he did work and probability and measure theory, Markov decision processes, optimality.

I had known the Rao-Blackwell theorem, the Blackwell Renewal theorem, Blackwell Approachability theorem.

There are things called Blackwell channels and David Blackwell Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley.

Most people will call him the leading Black mathematician of the 20th century.

David Blackwell was born in 1919.

By the time he got his PhD, he was still just 22.

When Blackwell left University of Illinois in Champaign Urbana, every major university that Blackwell applied to rejected him as a faculty member.

He wrote to the 105 HBCUs that exist and told them that he was available.

He wound up the early part of his career at Howard University, and he wrote all these papers while he was doing it.

Blackwell was offered a tenured professorship at Berkeley.

He never dreamed about about being a researcher.

If you look at his history, he had very modest ambitions.

He wanted to be a K-12 teacher, and eventually he ended up at the very, very top.

The Blackwell-Tapia Prize recognizes an individual who has extensive research contributions in the mathematical and statistical sciences and also has extensive contributions towards diversifying the profession.

I won the first Blackwell- Tapia Prize in mathematics.

He was still alive.

He came to it.

Yes.

I was born and raised in the town of Dangriga on the coast of Belize.

My encounter with mathematics happened with questions about nature and that closeness that I had with it early on.

I began asking about the stars and the planets.

I began learning about Kepler and elliptical orbits of planets.

So that connection to me with mathematical structures that were discovered thousands of years before was very gripping philosophically.

Welcome to CAARMS 23 and the Purdue University Mathematics department.

CAARMS is the premier conference for African American students in the mathematical sciences to present their research.

I think CAARMS is one of the most phenomenal things that happened for African Americans in mathematics.

I█d known people in the math community.

I helped to catalyze it because I could bring in additional funds from Bell Labs.

One of Bill Massey█s important contributions is the emphasis on excellence.

He was promoting the equation of diversity equals excellence.

It was him doing it and his energy doing it and his inventiveness.

I was really impressed by the number of people that were enthused by doing mathematical research, and what went on at these meetings.

To have had the opportunity to meet David Blackwell at that conference, while I did cherish it at the time, I think I cherish it all the more now.

A couple of those CAARMS conferences I've even been able to develop collaborations as a result, because we've had related research interests.

So that too has been exciting.

When you attend a CAARMS meeting, there is a big emotional feeling.

You see easily 40 people together who have the same goal.

Even if we seem far from each other.

We have some common interests.

In order to be it, you have to see it.

If a student█s going to see that they're going to succeed in mathematics, they need to see that someone else has succeeded at that level who looks like them, who has a similar experience and background.

From a young age, I really showed an interest in mathematical-type things.

I showed an interest in shapes, I showed an interest in puzzles.

I wanted to be an offensive lineman in the Big Ten.

And so when Penn State offered me a scholarship, it was a pretty easy choice.

I start taking more advanced math classes, and I start really, really liking it.

I like the way math classes are presented.

I like the focus.

Very little conflict between math and football.

In fact, a bunch of guys thought it was cool.

You know, like I was often helping people with their math homework or their stats homework.

After that, I declared for the NFL draft, and I was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

So I played three years for the Ravens.

It was fun being able to play football at the highest level against some of the best athletes in the world.

It's a special experience.

I got into the PhD program at MIT math after my first year in the league.

Many, many stresses were involved.

This was, in hindsight, this might have been a little bit too much.

In American football you really have to be prepared.

And so this idea of training, this idea of focus, this idea of precision and doing things over and over and over again...

The fun part is actually the failing.

You█re trying to figure something out.

You're struggling.

You think you have some insight and you get stuck.

I think it's really cool to be an academic, to be able to think about what math problems I want to think about all day.

I want to do math research.

I want to solve math problems.

I want to have a positive impact on young people and show them the power of math.

And I want to mentor them.

People who chose a certain profession, it is because of the profession.

But many times it█s because the person that communicated that profession to them.

I'm going to carry around two different matrices.

One of them is 360 by 10, the other one is 10 by 360.

And if I multiply those two matrices together, this is what I get out .

.

.

I█m serving as codirector of MAY-UP.

That's the Mathematically Advancing Young Undergraduates program.

We have four students from Morehouse College, four from Spelman College, and four from Clark Atlanta University.

They're learning under the direction of Dr. Shelby Wilson.

I am teaching a course in applied linear algebra paired with Python coding, where we're learning how to code and do some of the applications related to linear algebra concepts.

I am majoring in dual degree physics.

I think physics is pretty much mathematics, but the application of nature instead of logistics.

I love the instructor.

I like how we can relate on our interests.

There's not many people that you can find that enjoy mathematics.

Sometimes students choose other majors not knowing what's possible in mathematics.

And that█s really a big goal with MAY-UP, to show them what you can do in this area.

Oh, you're good at math and science.

You could be an engineer.

You can also be a mathematician.

This program has showed me I can do data science.

I can work for the government, private companies.

I'm still deciding what I want to do with my math degree, if I want to go the data science route, or if I want to go the finance route.

You can do it.

It just takes time and practice.

You will try, you will fail, you will get up and try again.

And if you do that enough times, you absolutely will succeed.

And it's not a bad life.

It's actually pretty fun life being a mathematician.

For abstract algebra two, Kobe Lawson-Chavanu.

Morehouse.

It was the only school that I applied to outside of California.

My peers and teachers and mentors have just really helped to make me a lot more confident in myself.

You know, for freshman year, he came in the door excited and was telling me about Dr. Cooper, who was the chair of the mathematics department there.

Dr. Cooper had taken a special interest in taking him under his wing and guiding him through this love of mathematics.

Let█s use n = 8 He's been my main mentor.

And so he always does this thing where when he's teaching you about the tangent line, he█ll be like, he just just kisses the curve and he█ll go like (kissing sound).

Dr. Cooper recommended me.

And I was like, okay, well, if the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab opportunity with Zerotti works out then I'll take that.

I was on a team of three there underneath Zerotti.

We had all worked on some machine learning research.

My assignment was was to do track fusion.

As far as the Applied Physics lab as a whole, you go down the hall and there█s a mathematician, PhDed, and you can talk about all manner of subjects.

There becomes this expectation that you're sort of one of us.

Once you start doing graduate level research, the professors are not going to see you as a student anymore.

I don't know that as a kid I was like, Kobe is going to be a mathematician, but I definitely knew he would do something that involved him to really problem solve.

I am probably more interested in something like graphics programming, textures and particle effects and those sorts of things, on computers.

I think that'd be really cool.

There's a fair amount of physics and math in that.

I'm currently at Emory University.

After I get my master's degree, I'll probably be looking in Silicon Valley, as well as in defense contracting.

One thing I've been very concerned about is, am I going to be able to still be learning?

We want to specify exactly which parameters you could expect to be globally, locally, or not identifiable, looking just at the model structure itself.

I always wanted to apply mathematics using compartmental models.

I've been considering biostatistics and epidemiology as well.

I'd be happy doing anything that has to do with disease modeling.

I ended up here at Michigan.

It's pretty hard being one of the only Black students in the department, one of only maybe like five that was accepted since they started the statistics PhD program.

I work mainly with public health data.

We try to find models to look at the dynamics with the disease and how it spreads.

I think my goal for the future is to be working in industry as a data analyst.

I'm just waiting for what comes next.

My name is Sylvester James Gates Jr., and I am a fallen mathematician.

The reason I call myself a fallen mathematician is because I'm a theoretical physicist, and the work that I do exists between mathematics and reality.

I call that place Mathicality.

It's an area I dreamt about as a child.

I was four years old when I first told my father I wanted to become a scientist.

It's always been my dream to find a piece of mathematics that was deeply buried as a secret in nature.

I found a new piece of mathematics had entered the physics literature.

It was called supersymmetry.

For every kind of particle, like a quark, which we call the fermion in physics, or like the Higgs particle, which we call a boson, there is a mirror image, so-called super partner.

And I immediately understood that it implied that there were more forms of matter and energy than any one had ever thought about before.

I wound up going to Harvard.

When I got there, to my very great surprise, there was another young person there who worked precisely on the same set of ideas.

His name was Warren Siegel.

So we formed a collaboration and we wrote a paper that took about six months.

It was called “Super Field Supergravity,” and it was about supersymmetry, and it was about gravity.

Built within, I think, our DNA is this whole evolutionary concept of symmetry, which is internalized as a concept of beauty.

And it's this concept of beauty, the seeing of these patterns that oftentimes leads people to very, very fundamental results in terms of their research.

Most people in the world don't know that they have a supercomputer between their ears.

At night while I'm sleeping or walking down the street talking to somebody, I realize I understand how to do something I didn't know how to do maybe a couple of days ago.

Why?

Because my brain is always trying to put difficult things together for it—things I don█t understand in such a way that I can understand.

Dreams start in our subconscious.

This is something that a lot of people sort of know about— that the subconscious and the imagination are intimately linked.

The feelings from painting, drawing, I started having those feelings when I did mathematics.

When your subconscious keeps working on something in the most unexpected way something can click.

Bohdan Paczynski posed a counting problem for how many images would be produced by stars acting as gravitational lenses.

I couldn't let that problem go.

I kept thinking and thinking about it.

Counting how many images is produced, this is impossible.

One day on Amtrak, I'm looking through the window feeling discouraged, and I had a eureka moment.

I'm looking out into the horizon, and I saw undulations on the horizon.

What if, instead of trying to directly solve these complicated equations that were just making me crazy, we interpret the solutions you're solving for as peaks and valleys in a mountainous terrain?

And then the whole thing just opened up, that you can get counting formulas for how many images you have.

There's order, and within .

.

.

within this order of mathematics, there's there's a beauty that comes from it.

And it points to an intelligent design.

God is a scientist.

God is a mathematician.

He's a Physicist.

There█s a very deep, mysterious aspect of this universe.

The proposition of science is very different from other faith- based belief systems.

The act of faith in science is that we're actually smart enough to understand what the universe is doing.

We don't know that's true.

That's an act of faith.

I think the core of mathematical exploration is when you have the sense that there's a pattern somewhere, and you become very interested in uncovering exactly what that pattern is.

Exploring connections of mathematical insight with, quote, real world problems can also be very helpful.

The mathematics community is split into two fields, sometimes called pure and applied.

I try not to use the word pure because if one side is pure, then the other side is impure?

So I tend to use theoretical and applied mathematics.

I want my math to do something to help the world.

So that's why I always say I'm an applied mathematician.

Understanding the fingerprints that we have.

Encoding the fingerprints that we have.

There are these amazing applications, this idea of harmonic analysis and wavelet theory, and that's what attracted me to it.

The clear connections they would have in real life.

I was born in Harlem in New York City.

My mother, who had a very strong music background, started me on piano lessons, and I still play the piano.

In my years at junior high I met Charles Wilson, an African American chemist.

Almost all that I am in terms of my approach to science, to knowledge, really come from the foundation that he lay.

He did point the way to the Saturday science program.

As luck would have it, the Martin Luther King Graduate Scholarship became available through New York University.

And I got it.

When I went to NIST, probabilistic methods of stochastic differential equations or Markov chains were really just becoming known.

Because of my training, my graduate training, I knew about these things.

If you have a coated or painted surface that is subject to wear, eventually it fades.

Painting a car is the most expensive thing that you have to do because you have to take the car off the line, spray it, you have to coat it a number of times.

And until recently, one of the most accurate measuring instruments for gloss was the human eye.

At NIST, they were interested in this and in particular the effects of the composition of paints in terms of the dispersion of particles.

Another part of this project has to do with a conversation that I had with a computer science colleague of mine.

We collaborated with members of this computer scientists group.

You are able to output an image, an image that you either never seen or never existed.

Movies almost never use real extras anymore.

They█re sort of painted in using this technology.

And she was telling me that this was coming.

The real situation is too hard.

And so we will describe it using a mathematical model, a simplification.

There's a famous British mathematician who said all models are wrong, but some are useful.

CReSIS is the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, and they focused on sea level rise and the impact on sea level rise by the melting glaciers in Antarctica.

We had hundreds of students working in Antarctica, work in the Arctic regions with the computer infrastructure component of polar science.

Polar Grid was a project to provide those scientists in the field with the equipment and the resources that they needed.

And that data was sent back here.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet had become of great significance and focus as it relates to climate change and the warming specifically.

So in 1972, over a30-year period, we started to see the ice shelf reduce, reduce, reduce, (clicking fingers sound) and then boom, it was gone.

I always had a passion for environmental science, and that is where Dr. Hayden█s program came in.

Could not have done it without you, and we truly stand on the shoulders of giants and of visionaries, of pioneers.

So, appreciate you.

I was born in a rural town in Georgia, under 2,500 people, where most of the people who lived there, lived in poverty.

Six of us lived in a three-room duplex house.

There was no electricity, no inside plumbing, no running water, no heat.

Well, we had a fireplace.

And the last room on the end was the kitchen.

We all followed the direction of our grandmother.

We said “This is the house that Ruth built.” And she stressed that we must get a formal education.

I came to Elizabeth City State University and stayed here for 26 years.

I was the first African American mathematician with a research doctorate in mathematics.

We decided to develop a degree program in computer science, but they really need Blacks in aviation.

We decided to have a concentration of minor in aviation in the computer science program.

And students are getting pilot licenses.

In fact, we even had one person who end up being the helicopter operator at the White House.

The purpose of ADJOINT is to diversify the mathematical and statistical sciences at the level of research faculty.

But the mean score is less than 200.

I was born in Monroe, Louisiana.

I was an air force brat.

I have my undergraduate degree from Arizona State University, then went on to my PhD at the University of Washington.

And I got interested in mathematical oncology, so using mathematics to help design and optimize treatments for cancer.

Dr. Trachette Jackson got the Blackwell-Tapia Prize.

She was the first female to get the prize.

We were really happy to have her agree to be an ADJOINT research leader.

My role with ADJOINT was to design a project that a team of mathematicians could come together and work on for two weeks.

Whatever happens with treatment, we're fine with, we just want to know if it fails or doesn't fail.

We are looking at a cancer immunotherapy problem where your own cells are engineered to attack a particular cancer molecule.

I'm a part of this mathematical modeling group, and we are looking at brain tumors.

The work I do as a mathematician is very transferable to the medical field because of the type of imaging and data that I actually look at: images that have this speckled noise, these ultrasound images, these medical images, and these synthetic aperture radar imaging to make them more efficient.

I always was in a space where education would be my foundation, so I went on to Mississippi State to start my master's degree.

I█ve never been in a space with that many White people in my life, right?

And I didn't fit in.

And my grandmother came to me in a dream.

I think you█re supposed to be a teacher.

And from that moment on, I followed that dream.

And when I figured out who I was, it was good enough for me.

Almost as important as the research aspect is creating a sense of community.

Working together as a group is very empowering.

My primary research area is mathematical biology.

I teach courses in probability and stochastic processes at Clemson University.

I applied for the program, the ADJOINT program in 2022.

I was a part of one of the Covid groups.

I worked with Abba Gumel, who was an epidemiologist, and we worked on modeling Covid-19.

I don't think I even realized how much I needed a space like this.

I'm surrounded by African American mathematicians.

I can talk math with them, and it's energizing.

It is, it is motivating.

All right, here we go.

One, two, three.

It's so important to have programs like this, because once you enter the pipeline in academia, it█s a leaky one.

And we need to keep every single one of these fantastic individuals involved in mathematical research and involved in moving up the ladder in tenured positions at universities in the country.

I've learned just being here these two weeks, I'm not alone.

There are a lot of help and resources, and I am grateful to know these things.

As I look at young people who look like me and who might have the kind of dreams I had when I was young, what I think about is, how much is my society going to be betting against them just as it bet against me when I was their age?

We welcome them.

Mathematics really belongs to them.

It's not something that we gatekeep.

It's something that they already own, and, and it's sort of innate to all of us.

I'm 70 years old.

When I can look back to when I was a teenager and how things were and how things are now, I see tremendous change for the better.

Mathematics has shaped me into a more idealistic person.

My creativity and my imagination and my experience allow me to create a very different approach to mathematics, and to see mathematics from a very different angle.