Dean, Nathaniel

Impact on the world

A leading figure in algorithmic and abstract graph theory, Dean spent eleven years in Bell Labs' Software Production Research Department producing more than thirty scientific publications on graph algorithms and the data-visualization techniques used to render complex networks; in 1995 he founded the Conference for African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), a recurring venue for Black mathematicians to present original research that continued for decades, and he edited four American Mathematical Society volumes documenting African American contributions to the field, including both volumes of African Americans in Mathematics. He went on to serve an unusually long decade-long tenure as president of the National Association of Mathematicians (2005-2015) after first serving as its vice president, while also sitting on the Mathematical Association of America's Board of Governors and as an associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Life & background

Born January 9, 1956, Dean earned a BS in mathematics and physics from Mississippi State University in 1978, an MS in applied mathematics from Northeastern University in 1983, and a PhD in mathematics from Vanderbilt University in 1987 with a dissertation on contractible edges and conjectures about path and cycle numbers. After eleven years in Bell Labs' Software Production Research Department, where he received the company's President's Silver Award in 1997, he moved into academia as an associate professor of computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, supervising four PhD students across algorithmic graph theory and biological computing. He became a full professor and mathematics department chair at Texas Southern University in 2003, moved to Texas State University in 2006, and remained there for the rest of his career, directing TSU's NIH-funded Computational Research Laboratory and serving as managing editor of the Journal of Graph Theory. He died in January 2021.

Sources

1. Mathematically Gifted & Black; Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo)