Falconer, Etta Zuber

Impact on the world

Earned her PhD in mathematics from Emory University in 1969, becoming roughly the tenth or thirteenth African American woman to hold that degree depending on the count, having studied as an undergraduate directly under Evelyn Boyd Granville, already profiled in this collection, at Fisk University; she went on to spend 37 years at Spelman College, declining recruitment offers from Harvard and Yale to instead build the historically Black women's college into a recognized leader in science education, tripling the proportion of students majoring in science, mathematics, or engineering from roughly 10 to nearly 40 percent and founding the NASA Women in Science and Engineering program, which has produced more than 50 doctorates since its 1987 launch.

Life & background

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933 to a physician father and musician mother who had herself studied at Spelman College, Falconer entered Fisk University at just 15, majoring in mathematics with a chemistry minor and graduating summa cum laude in 1953 after being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa; one of her formative instructors there was Evelyn Boyd Granville, herself one of the first Black women to earn a mathematics doctorate. She earned a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1954, finding the isolation of being one of very few Black students in Madison difficult enough that she chose not to pursue her doctorate there immediately, instead returning to Mississippi to teach at Okolona Junior College, where she met and married basketball coach Dolan Falconer. When her husband took a coaching position at Atlanta's Morris Brown College in 1965, Falconer approached the head of Spelman College's mathematics department directly and told him she needed a job; he hired her as an instructor, beginning a 37-year relationship with the institution where her own mother had once studied. While teaching, she completed her PhD at Emory University in 1969 with a dissertation on quasigroup theory in abstract algebra, and despite recruitment interest from both Harvard and Yale, she chose to remain at Spelman specifically because her passion lay in teaching Black women and creating career opportunities for them in mathematics and science rather than pursuing her own research career further. She eventually chaired Spelman's mathematics department, served as associate provost for science programs and policy, returned to graduate school herself in 1982 to earn a master's in computer science specifically to help establish Spelman's computer science department, and founded the college's NASA Women in Science and Engineering Program in 1987, which has since produced more than 50 doctorates among its participants; she received the Association for Women in Mathematics' Louise Hay Award in 1995 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Lifetime Mentor Award in 2001, dying of pancreatic cancer in 2002 at age 68. Spelman colleagues credited her directly with transforming the college's reputation in the sciences, and an annual lecture series in mathematics education now bears her name.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; MacTutor History of Mathematics; Encyclopædia Britannica; African American Registry; Association for Women in Mathematics archive; International Mathematical Union