Vivienne Malone Mayes Life And Accomplishments

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A Mathematician, a student who is a expert or student of mathematics, isn’t a easy title to have. In order to become a mathematician there are many hours put into school work and many years in order to get their degrees, but a black mathematician is even harder to achieve. Vivienne Malone Mayes, a black mathematician who has faced segregation and discrimination in order to get where she was went through a deal and became the fifth African American to receive her Phd in mathematics. First thing to remember, her accomplishments were in the 1900’s where racism was still alive and well, through the differences she had with her classmates she still pulled through with many achievements such as being the first black to serve on the executive committee …show more content…

After this she went to Fisk University to major in medicine not math, but later her opinion changed because of a student she met at the university whom later became her husband, James Jeffries Mayes, a woman named Evelyn Boyd Granville who was, “one of the first African-American women to receive the Ph.D. in mathematics”, and Lee Lorch who was a chairman of the Department of Mathematics at Fisk University, and she applauded his teaching. (Robertson) To put it differently, Vivienne didn’t go to Fisk University with the idea of becoming the fifth African American to get her PhD she went in looking for medical opportunities, but influence changed her opinion putting mathematics as her full focus, which was a good move for her since she made history. As a matter of fact, “she was awarded a doctorate for her thesis A Structure Problem in Asymptotic Analysis by the University of Texas at Austin” because of her conclusion that if you, “Let F(x) and G(x) be two functions defined for 0 ≤ x (-- removed HTML --) 0 there is a T > 0 such that | F(x) - G(x) | (-- removed HTML --) T.” (Robertson) In general, Vivienne Mayes put a bookmark in the mathematician industry, creating a thesis and becoming a mathematician when their were limited African American women, and many