Goins, Edray Herber

Impact on the world

Served as president of the National Association of Mathematicians from 2015 to 2020, during which he organized the ad hoc committee — alongside Don King and Asamoah Nkwanta — that took over stewardship of the influential Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD) website Scott Williams had built and maintained for eleven years, ensuring its survival as a key historical record. He has published more than 25 journal articles across number theory, graph theory, and representation theory, run a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates since arriving at Pomona College, and become an outspoken public voice — including in a widely discussed 2019 New York Times feature — on the isolation Black mathematicians often face in majority-white departments.

Life & background

Born June 29, 1972, in South Central Los Angeles and raised by his mother, a public-school teacher, Goins attended Los Angeles public schools, won a Bronze Medal in Mathematics at the LA Academic Decathlon in 1989, and earned a BSc in mathematics and physics from Caltech in 1994. He completed his PhD in number theory at Stanford University in 1999, with postdoctoral positions at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, followed by an Irvine Visiting Professorship at Caltech from 2001 to 2004. He spent fourteen years on the faculty at Purdue University before resigning in 2018 over what he described publicly as an unsustainable lack of institutional support for diversity, moving to Pomona College, where he is now Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and runs the Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience (PRiME). He has worked as a researcher for both Harvard University and the National Security Agency, written and spoken extensively under the heading “Diary of a Black Mathematician,” and collaborated on published research with fellow Black mathematicians including Asamoah Nkwanta and Talitha Washington, both noted elsewhere in this collection's broader record of African American mathematical scholarship.

Sources

1. MacTutor History of Mathematics; Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); Pomona College faculty page; Mathematically Gifted & Black