In the spring of 2001 I took at Women and Minorities in Mathematics course at Appalachian State University with Dr. Sarah Greenwald. In this course we studied mathematicians that are minorities to the field of mathematics. We learned about how these minorities struggled with gender and equity issue. While today these problems have been reduced there are still problems today. We learned about gender and minority biases on tests that tend to cause minorities to not doe well on test. There are still problems in the classrooms with teachers and professors not giving the proper support to all students.
One mathematician that I studied was David Blackwell. He is known as one of the greatest statisticians of his time. He had a good family that supported him when he was young and he went to a mixed school for his early years. This set him up to have the promising future he had. Not until Blackwell entered the working world did he suffer any hardships because of his race. He applied to many black universities because he knew he could not get a job at a white university. Only after he was able to establish himself was he offered a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Here he advised many students and wrote over 40 of his papers. Blackwell has done work in several fields such as game theory, Markov matrices, statistics and probability. Blackwell has established himself as a great mathematician and has set high standards for those who wish to follow in his footsteps.
School Experiences in a Historical Context
Multicultural Issues in a Thematic Context
What Kind of Mathematician is He?
Summary of Major Accomplishments