Granville, Evelyn

Evelyn Granville, née Evelyn Boyd, (born May 1, 1924, Washington, D.C., U.S.), American mathematician who was one of the first African American women to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics.

Boyd received an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics from Smith College, Northampton, Mass., in 1945. She received a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1949 from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where she studied under Einar Hille. She was the second African American woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics. From 1949 to 1950 she had a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, and from 1950 to 1952 she was an associate professor of mathematics at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1952 Boyd became a mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington, D.C., where she worked on missile fuses. Her division of NBS was later absorbed by the United States Army and became the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories. There she became interested in the new field of computer programming, which led her to the corporation International Business Machines (IBM) in 1956. She worked on programs in the assembly language SOAP and later in FORTRAN for the IBM 650, which was the first computer intended for use in businesses, and the IBM 704. In 1957 she joined IBM’s Vanguard Computing Center in Washington, D.C., where she wrote computer programs that tracked orbits for the uncrewed Vanguard satellite and the crewed Mercury spacecraft. She left IBM in 1960 to move to Los Angeles, where she worked at the aerospace firm Space Technology Laboratories; there she did further work on satellite orbits. In 1962 she joined the aerospace firm North American Aviation, where she worked on celestial mechanics and trajectory calculations for the Apollo project. She returned to IBM to its Federal Systems Division in 1963 as senior mathematician.

Boyd returned to academic life in 1967 as an assistant professor of mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles. Teaching the mathematics course that was required for those who wished to become elementary school teachers led to an interest in mathematics education. She married Edward Granville in 1970. In 1975 she and her colleague Jason Frand wrote a textbook, Theory and Applications of Mathematics for Teachers. From 1985 to 1988 she taught computer science and mathematics at Texas College in Tyler, and in 1990 she was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of Texas, also in Tyler. She retired in 1997.