Houston, Johnny L.

Impact on the world

Alongside Scott W. Williams, Houston led the informal “Black and Third World Mathematicians” gathering at the 1969 Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans that grew into the National Association of Mathematicians, the principal professional organization advancing Black and other underrepresented mathematicians in the United States; he went on to chair NAM's history and archival efforts for over five decades, authoring The History of NAM: The First Thirty Years (1969-1999) and numerous Notices of the American Mathematical Society retrospectives, including tributes to colleagues such as Evelyn Boyd Granville. He also chaired the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Clark Atlanta University and later served as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Elizabeth City State University.

Life & background

Born November 19, 1941, in Sandersville, Georgia, and raised in poverty by his grandmother and mother with no adult male present in the household, Houston attended Ballard Hudson High School in Macon before earning a BA in mathematics from Morehouse College in 1964. He completed an MS in mathematics at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in 1966, studied topology for a year at the Université de Strasbourg in France on a Merrill fellowship, and earned his PhD in mathematics from Purdue University in 1974 under advisor Eugene Schenkman. He chaired the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Clark Atlanta University from 1975 to 1981, briefly held the Fuller E. Callaway Professorship of Computer Science at Fort Valley State University, then joined Elizabeth City State University in 1984 as Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, later serving as Senior Research Professor there from 1988 until his 2010 retirement as professor emeritus. Beyond his three-decade tenure as NAM's Executive Secretary, he served on the Mathematical Association of America's Board of Governors, the National Institutes of Health's MARC review committee, and the Human Resource Advisory Group of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and received NAM's own Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. He is married to Virginia Lawrence Houston and has two daughters.

Sources

1. The HistoryMakers; Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); MacTutor History of Mathematics (National Association of Mathematicians); Notices of the American Mathematical Society; Mathematically Gifted & Black