- Media Title Evelyn Granville
- Media Type Image
- Website Name Encyclopedia Britannica
- Publisher Encyclopedia Britannica
- URL https://www.britannica.com/biography/Evelyn-Granville#/media/1/1756933/274700
- Access Date February 13, 2025
Topics: African Americans, Black History Month, Civics, Civil Rights, Computer Science, Diversity in Science, Mathematics, Women in Science
Dr. Evelyn Granville (born May 1, 1924, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died June 27, 2023, Silver Spring, Maryland) was an 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, Massachusetts, 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 a senior mathematician.
Britannica Online: Dr. Evelyn Granville
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