Daphne L. Smith

Daphne Letitia Smith was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),[1] in 1985.[2] 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".[3]

Smith is originally from Ocala, Florida,[1] and graduated from Spelman College in 1980.[3] 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.[2] 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.[3]

References
  1. 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.
  2. Daphne L. Smith at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. Representative: Daphne L. Smith, C'80, Spelman College, retrieved 2018-05-02
  • Daphne L. Smith, Mathematician of the African Diaspora, Scott W. Williams, State University of New York at Buffalo
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