Cox, Elbert Frank

Impact on the world

Earned his PhD in mathematics from Cornell University in 1925, becoming the first Black person anywhere in the world to hold that degree, in a year when only 28 mathematics doctorates were awarded across the entire United States and 31 Black men were lynched; his dissertation extended the work of Danish mathematician Niels Nörlund on Euler polynomials, introducing what became known as generalized Euler polynomials, and he spent the next 40 years teaching, mostly at Howard University, directly opening the path for later Black mathematicians including Dudley Woodard, William Claytor, Marjorie Lee Browne, Evelyn Boyd Granville, and David Blackwell, all of whom received their own doctorates from American universities in the years following his breakthrough.

Life & background

Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1895 to a school principal father and a deeply religious, education-focused family, Cox grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood that was nonetheless segregated in its schooling, and survived a serious 1903 race riot in his hometown that killed eleven people and wounded fifty, prompting many Black families to leave the city. A talented violinist offered a scholarship to study at the Prague Conservatory of Music, he chose mathematics and physics instead, earning his bachelor's degree from Indiana University in 1917 with the word 'Colored' printed across his transcript, then served in the U.S. Army in France during World War I before teaching high school mathematics in Kentucky and entering Cornell's doctoral program. After earning his PhD in 1925, he became the first African American inducted into the American Mathematical Society, then spent four years building West Virginia State College's mathematics and physics department, including establishing the historically Black college's first science library, before moving permanently to Howard University in 1929, where he remained until his 1965 retirement, chairing the mathematics department from 1957 to 1961 and personally mentoring future mathematician William Claytor, the third African American to earn a mathematics doctorate. He received remarkably little public recognition during his own lifetime despite his foundational achievement, dying in 1969; six years later Howard's mathematics department established the Elbert F. Cox Scholarship Fund in his honor, and the National Association of Mathematicians continues presenting its annual Cox-Talbot Address at national meetings to this day.

Sources

1. MacTutor History of Mathematics; Cornell Chronicle; Cornell Alumni Magazine; Math and Movement; University at Buffalo Mathematics Department archive