Marjorie Lee Browne was a well-known mathematician and educator who was only the third African-American woman to earn her Ph.D. in mathematics. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee on September 9, 191 to Mary Taylor Lee and Lawrence Johnson Lee. Browne’s mother died when she was only two, so she was raised by her father, a railway postal clerk, and her stepmother, Lottie Lee, who was a school teacher. Her stepmother’s encouragement to stay focused on her studies and her father’s love of mathematics both influenced Browne during her time in school.
Browne 's father, who completed two years of college and had a civil service job, was more privileged than other blacks at the time. This helped him to get his children the best education available,
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Other grants she earned also allowed her to study computing and numerical analysis at UCLA and differential topology at CUNY from 1965-1966.
In 1969, Browne obtained for her department the first Shell Grant for awards to exceptional mathematics students. In 1975, she was awarded the first W.W. Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education, a distinction handed out by the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics. During her lifetime, Browne also served as a member of various organizations, such as the Women 's Research Society; the American Mathematical Society; and the Mathematical Association of America.
As a scholar, Marjorie Lee Browne left a great mark at North Carolina Central University. Not only did she serve as Chair of the Mathematics Department, make a reputation as a phenomenal professor, and write the proposal that won the school the IBM grant, she was also Principal Investigator, Coordinator of the Mathematics Section and Lecturer of the Summer Institute for Secondary School Science and Mathematics Teachers. Browne also wrote a paper entitled A Note on the Classical Groups which was published in the American Mathematics Monthly in