Daphne Letitia Smith was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1985. She is the president of the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College, her alma mater, and a member of Spelman's Board of Trustees; in 2011 she was honored with the Alumnae Association's Hall of Fame Award, "the organization’s highest honor".
Smith is originally from Ocala, Florida, and graduated from Spelman College in 1980. At MIT, she studied probability theory as a student of Richard M. Dudley; her dissertation was Vapnik-Červonenkis Classes and the Supremum Distribution of a Gaussian Process. She taught at the University of Georgia, Georgia State University and Spelman College before turning to industry, where she has worked as a mathematician and healthcare analyst specializing in disease management.
References
- ^ Blackman, Terrence Richard; Belcher, John (October 2017), "Using a Mathematics Cultural Resonance Approach for Building Capacity in the Mathematical Sciences for African American Communities", in Jao, Limin; Radakovic, Nenad (eds.), Transdisciplinarity in Mathematics Education: Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries, Springer, pp. 125–149, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-63624-5_7, ISBN 978-3-319-63624-5. See in particular p. 146.
- ^ Daphne L. Smith at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Representative: Daphne L. Smith, C'80, Spelman College, retrieved 2018-05-02
External links
- Daphne L. Smith, Mathematician of the African Diaspora, Scott W. Williams, State University of New York at Buffalo
- Living people
- People from Ocala, Florida
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- African-American mathematicians
- African-American women mathematicians
- Probability theorists
- Spelman College alumni
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni
- University of Georgia faculty
- Georgia State University faculty
- Spelman College faculty
- 20th-century American women mathematicians