Evelyn Boyd Granville

Evelyn Boyd was born on the first of May 1924 at Washington, D.C., the younger of two daughters of William Boyd — a custodian of the United States Government Printing Office — and Julia Boyd, a postal clerk of the United States Postal Service. The parents separated when Evelyn was young, and she and her sister were raised by their mother and the latter’s sister in the Black middle-class Washington of the inter-war period.

She was placed at six at the Dunbar High School at Washington and at sixteen at Smith College on a Phi Beta Kappa scholarship. She took the bachelor’s in mathematics and physics at Smith College in 1945 summa cum laude — first in the class of 1945. She was admitted in 1945 to the doctoral programme in mathematics at Yale University on the Smith College fellowship and an additional Julius Rosenwald Fellowship.

She completed the doctor of philosophy in mathematics at Yale in 1949 — the second African American woman to receive the doctorate in mathematics, after Euphemia Lofton Haynes at Catholic University in 1943 and on the same date as Marjorie Lee Browne (placed in this archive) at the University of Michigan, both of whom graduated within several months of Granville. The Granville dissertation, On Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain, was supervised by Einar Hille.

She took the postdoctoral appointment from 1949 to 1950 at the New York University Institute for Mathematics and Mechanics — the first Black woman postdoctoral fellow at the Institute — and the associate-professor position at Fisk University at Nashville from 1950 to 1952.

She was hired in January 1952 by the United States Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratory at the Bureau of Standards at Washington as a research mathematician on the closing-period United States Army missile-guidance computer programmes of the Korean-War period. She held the position until 1956.

She was hired in 1956 by IBM at New York as a senior applied mathematician of the IBM 704 computer division — the principal first-generation IBM scientific-computer development team. She was assigned to the IBM contracts for the NASA Vanguard programme (1956–1959) and the NASA Mercury programme (1959–1960), as principal computer-orbital-trajectory mathematician at IBM Manhattan.

She worked at IBM Manhattan and IBM Washington from 1956 to 1960 on the computer-orbital-trajectory mathematics for the Vanguard satellite-launching programme and the early Mercury orbital flights — predominantly on the high-precision interpolation methods for the orbital-determination position calculations.

She was reassigned in 1960 to the IBM Los Angeles office on the Atlas, Titan and Saturn rocket-trajectory programmes, where she worked until 1967.

She was named in 1967 associate professor of mathematics at the California State University at Los Angeles and rose to professor in 1969. She held the professor’s position for the following sixteen years until 1984.

She was awarded in 2000 the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her contributions to mathematics education.

She died at Silver Spring, Maryland on the twenty-seventh of June 2023 of natural causes, at ninety-nine.

She is honored here as the orbital-trajectory mathematician of the Vanguard programme.