Mahoney, Carolyn Ray Boone

Impact on the world

A specialist in combinatorics, graph theory, and matroids whose research with mathematician Kiran Chilakamarri produced new Ramsey-type results for graphs on the integer lattice, Mahoney became in 1989 the first mathematician hired to the founding faculty of California State University San Marcos, one of twelve inaugural professors who built the new campus from the ground up; she went on to serve as a National Science Foundation program director before becoming, in 2005, the 18th president of Lincoln University of Missouri — the historically Black university's first female president — where she led until her 2012 retirement, raising enrollment and expanding campus housing.

Life & background

Born December 22, 1946, in Memphis, Tennessee, the sixth of thirteen children of Stephen and Myrtle Boone, Mahoney was raised largely by her grandmother while her mother worked, and was encouraged in mathematics by the nuns at the Catholic schools she attended after her parents separated; she graduated from Father Bertrand High School in 1964 with scholarship help from Sister Mary Kilian. She began college at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, before finishing her mathematics degree summa cum laude at Siena College in Memphis in 1970, then earned a master's (1972) and PhD (1984) in mathematics from Ohio State University, with a dissertation on the unimodality of independent set numbers in matroids. She taught at Denison University and Ohio State before her 1989 appointment at California State University San Marcos, served as an NSF program director in 1994-95, worked as an administrator at Elizabeth City State University, and was named president of Lincoln University of Missouri in 2005. She has been inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, and both a scholarship at CSU San Marcos and a walking trail at Lincoln University bear her name.

Sources

1. Lincoln University of Missouri (Blue Tiger Commons); Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); Mathematically Gifted & Black; Ohio State University (“Hidden Figures Revealed”)