Frazier Svager, Thyrsa Anne

Impact on the world

A founding member of the National Association of Mathematicians in 1969, Frazier Svager became one of the first African American women to earn a doctorate in mathematics, completing her PhD on measure theory at Ohio State University in 1965 under advisor Paul Reichelderfer; she spent 39 years at Central State University in her hometown of Wilberforce, Ohio, rising from assistant professor in 1954 to department chair, then to vice president for academic affairs in 1984 and provost in 1987, briefly serving as interim president in 1995. After her death, her husband established the Thyrsa Frazier Svager Fund, which by 2017 had supported numerous African American women majoring in mathematics at partner universities.

Life & background

Born Thyrsa Anne Frazier on June 16, 1930, in Wilberforce, Ohio, to a statistician father and a mother who taught literature at Central State College, she graduated valedictorian from Wilberforce University Preparatory Academy at 16 and was one of only four Black students at Antioch College, where she became close friends with fellow student Coretta Scott King — whom she later encouraged to marry Martin Luther King Jr. She graduated from Antioch in 1951 with one of the highest Graduate Record Exam scores in the college's history at the time, then earned a master's (1952) and PhD (1965) in mathematics from Ohio State University, working a year as a statistical analyst at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and teaching at Texas Southern University before joining Central State University's faculty in 1954. She married physics professor and Holocaust survivor Aleksandar Svager in 1968; the couple lived on one salary and invested the other to fund future scholarships. She retired in 1993 with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters and was named Professor Emeritus, briefly returning as interim president in 1995, and died July 23, 1999.

Sources

1. Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); The Dayton Foundation; Ohio State University (“Hidden Figures Revealed”)