Evelyn Granville, 1924 -

Evelyn Granville was born and raised in Washington, D.C., which at that point still maintained a segregated public school system. From an early age, she enjoyed and excelled in academics. Two teachers at Dunbar High School in particular inspired her love of mathematics, and with their encouragement, she received a partial scholarship to Smith College. She continued to excel at Smith, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1945. She then attended graduate school at Yale University, studying functional analysis with Einar Hille, her dissertation advisor, and received her PhD in just four years, in 1949. The same year, another woman, Marjorie Lee Browne, also received a PhD in mathematics, from the University of Michigan; together, they were the first two black women in America to be awarded doctorates in the subject.

She next spent a year as a research assistant at the New York University Institute of Mathematics and taught part-time in the university's math department. In 1950, she was hired as an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, an institution, originally founded in 1866 to educate freed slaves, that claims many black luminaries among its graduates and faculty, including W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Aaron Douglas, John Hope Franklin and Nikki Giovanni. In 1956, Granville joined IBM, where she analyzed orbits and developed computer procedures for NASA's Project Vanguard and Project Mercury space programs.

Granville held a number of prestigious positions across the country thereafter, including a research jobs at the Computation and Data Reduction Center of the U.S. Space Technology Laboratories and the North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Divisions, and returned to IBM as a senior mathematician in 1963. In the late 1960's, she turned her attention to improving mathematics education at all levels, teaching in Los Angeles elementary school classrooms and enrichment programs.

Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, she served on the faculty of several colleges and universities, including California State University, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Tyler, where she was appointed to the Sam A. Lindsey Chair in 1990. Her professional affiliations include the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Association of University Women.