Donaldson, James A.

Impact on the world

As chair of Howard University's mathematics department from 1972 to 1990, Donaldson developed tenured research faculty and oversaw the 1976 launch of Howard's mathematics PhD program — the first doctoral program in mathematics at any HBCU — which became, and remains, a major national producer of African American mathematics PhDs. One of seventeen founding members who met at the 1969 Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans to establish the National Association of Mathematicians, he went on to serve on the Council of the American Mathematical Society, as second vice president of the Mathematical Association of America, and as editor of the NAM newsletter, later serving as Dean of Howard's College of Arts and Sciences from 1999 to 2012.

Life & background

Born April 17, 1941, on a farm in Madison County, Florida, one of eleven children of Audrey Brown and Oliver Donaldson, Donaldson grew up attending segregated schools and, on the advice of his high school mathematics teacher in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1957, graduating with an AB in mathematics in 1961. He earned an MS (1963) and PhD (1965) in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his dissertation on partial differential equations was supervised by Ray Langenbach amid what he later described as a constraining and sometimes hostile racial climate that he worked actively to challenge. After teaching appointments at Howard, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of New Mexico, he returned to Howard permanently in 1971, chairing its mathematics department for eighteen years before serving a 1998-99 leave as acting president of his alma mater, Lincoln University, and then as Howard's Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for thirteen years. His research and writing focused on differential equations, the history of mathematics, and mathematics accessibility, and he published more than fifty papers and articles over his career. He retired with emeritus status in 2013, received an honorary doctorate from Lincoln University in 2018 and the University of Illinois's Mathematics Alumni Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement in 2019, and died October 18, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Sources

1. Howard University (“The Dig”); The HistoryMakers; Notices of the American Mathematical Society (obituary, Feb. 2021); University of Illinois Mathematics Department; Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo)