Johnson, Raymond Lewis

Impact on the world

Johnson's 1964 admission to Rice University broke a whites-only restriction written into the institution's founding charter, surviving a lawsuit by alumni opposed to desegregation before he became, in 1969, the first African American to earn a Rice PhD in mathematics — a distinction that, as he later noted, also made him the last Rice mathematics PhD recipient who was Black for more than fifty years. Over a forty-year career at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he became the department's first Black faculty member, first Black full professor, and longest-serving Black faculty member, he chaired the mathematics department and personally mentored 23 doctoral students, the great majority African American and many of them women, prompting a Maryland administrator to credit him directly with the department's success in educating underrepresented minorities; he received the AAAS's 2006 Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement and the White House's 2012 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Life & background

Born June 25, 1943, in Alice, Texas, and raised largely by his grandmother and her second husband, who taught him to read, Johnson attended a segregated two-room schoolhouse before his town's high school integrated just before he entered ninth grade, where a Sputnik-era enrichment program and mentorship from mathematics professor Howard B. Curtis at the University of Texas shaped his path; he earned a BA in mathematics from UT Austin in 1963, having been steered away from the courses of topologist R.L. Moore, whose racism was widely known on campus. Admitted to Rice University in 1963, his enrollment was delayed a year by an alumni lawsuit before he started as a regular graduate student in 1964, completing his PhD in 1969 on parabolic partial differential equations under advisor Jim Douglas Jr. He joined the University of Maryland, College Park, faculty in 1968, with a two-year interlude at Howard University (1976-78) helping establish that institution's new mathematics PhD program, and remained at Maryland for the rest of his forty-year career, chairing the department from 1991 to 1996. In 2007 he returned to Rice as the W.L. Moody Jr. Visiting Professor of Mathematics, the same chair his own doctoral advisor had once held, where he continued mentoring minority students alongside mathematician Richard Tapia.

Sources

1. Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); Mathematically Gifted & Black; Rice University News & Media Relations; Science/AAAS