MAT 2580 Linear Algebra

Comment due Monday, February 16

It’s Black history month! For this assignment, you will write a short profile or biography of a Black mathematician or math educator (or someone else in the Black-in-math community). You will submit your profile as a comment on this post. You have lots of choices for where to find this information and you can use whatever resources you like. Here are two suggestions:

Suggestion 1: 

A few years ago, the @BlackInMath account on Twitter hosted #BlackInMathWeek to celebrate living Black mathematicians. If you have an account, you can scroll back to see the old posts where Black mathematicians introduced themselves.

Suggestion 2: 

The awesome website Mathematically Gifted & Black has honored a new person every day of Black History Month in recent years. You can check out honorees on the Circle of Excellence tab at the top of their page. (You can also check out their Instagram page.)

Instructions

Pick one Black mathematician or math educator to learn about. Aside from their MG&B profile or their Twitter introduction, what else can you learn about them? (How has their life changed since their Twitter introduction or their MG&B profile?) Write a short biography (5 or 6 sentences….or more!) of this person. Include their name and where they are on their math journey (are they a graduate student? a professor? a teacher? where? do they do research in math? are they involved in the Black-in-Math community in some other way?). Include a photo of them if you like. Include the field of math that they study and anything else you can tell us about them! What makes this person so awesome and interesting to you? What questions do you have for them? Include links to the pages where you found information about them.

Submit your profile as a comment on this post below for participation credit

Fun fact

Most of you might be too young to know who the rapper MC Hammer is, but he was a childhood hero of mine. He’s an activist too and in modern times he’s used his Twitter platform to promote different #BlackInSTEM initiatives, including #BlackInMath.

During Black in math week, MC Hammer retweeted and followed my friend Marissa AND IT WAS SO EXCITING!!! (PS, Someone should totally profile Marissa for this assignment because she is a BOSS! BTW she’s no longer a postdoc at Georgia Tech; she’s now a professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison.)