Evelyn Granville

(1924 - Present AD)

Evelyn Boyd Granville was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Dunbar High School, a segregated high school at the time. Her interest in mathematics was encouraged by two mathematics teachers, Ulysses Basset (a graduate of Yale) and Mary Cromwell (graduate of the University of Pennsylvania). Granville attended Smith College on a partial scholarship. In 1945 she graduated summa cum laude and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Granville worked with Einar Hille, a distinguished mathematician in the field of functional analysis, as her Ph.D. faculty advisor at Yale University. Evelyn Granville received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale in 1949, the same year as another woman mathematician, Marjorie Lee Browne received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan. Granville and Browne represented the first two Black women to receive doctorates in Mathematics in the United States.

Following her graduation from Yale Evelyn Granville spent a year as a research assistant at the New York University Institute of Mathematics and part-time instructor in the mathematics department of New York University (NYU). Professor Granville was then appointed as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee from 1950-1952, where two of her former students went on to receive Ph.D.s in Mathematics, Vivienne Malone Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer. Dr. Vivienne Mayes received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Etta Falconer received her Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Emory University.