Stubblefield, Beauregard

Impact on the world

Despite an excellent undergraduate record, Stubblefield was turned down for graduate study by multiple universities before earning his PhD in topology from the University of Michigan in 1959 with research on imbedding theorems for N-manifolds, published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society; he chaired the mathematics department at the University of Liberia in Monrovia from 1952 to 1956, helped establish the National Association of Mathematicians as an international organization, and in 1978 personally approved NAM's first major grant, from NOAA, while working as a federal research mathematician — service later recognized with NAM's eighth Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

Life & background

Born July 31, 1923, in Navasota, Texas, the son of a watchmaker who had him calculate the family grocery bill each week to sharpen his arithmetic, Stubblefield lost a Prairie View College scholarship to another student before persevering to earn a BS (1943) and MA (1945) from Prairie View A&M University. He earned an MS (1951) and PhD (1959) in mathematics from the University of Michigan, chairing the mathematics department at the University of Liberia at Monrovia from 1952 to 1956 before returning to the U.S. as a research mathematician at the Detroit Arsenal. He held faculty positions at Stevens Institute of Technology, Oakland University in Michigan, and Appalachian State University, then spent the final stretch of his career as a mathematician with the U.S. Department of Commerce's GERL/ERL/NOAA, retiring in 1992. He published several elementary textbooks on geometry, trigonometry, and computer programming, received NAM's Distinguished Service Award in 1994 and Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and died January 17, 2013, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sources

1. MacTutor History of Mathematics; Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (SUNY Buffalo); Find a Grave; Appalachian State University (Women and Minorities in Mathematics archive)