Minorities and mathematics

SUMMARY: Minorities are historically underrepresented in American mathematics and efforts have been made to rectify this.

Mathematics is a vital tool in modern life, and mastery of mathematical subjects is a requirement to enter many professions, including medicine, engineering, and the sciences. For this reason, observed trends in mathematical achievement in school and representation in mathematics-oriented professions, both dominated by White and Asian people with other minorities lagging behind, give cause for concern. At the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the media publicized information about the performance and underrepresentation of minorities in mathematics, many authors published works about minority individuals in mathematics, and mathematicians and mathematics educators designed and implemented successful educational initiatives and programs.

Several explanations have been offered to explain the underrepresentation of people of color in mathematics. One is that students of color have fewer opportunities to master mathematics because they may be more likely to attend low-achieving schools, which may have more inexperienced and uncertified teachers and fewer teachers with graduate degrees. A second explanation is the lack of role models, since many mathematics faculty and prize winners are White or Asian, so students of color (or their teachers) may incorrectly believe that mathematics ability is somehow linked to race or ethnicity. In addition, students may not feel comfortable taking advanced mathematics classes in which they are the only person of color. A third factor is that some minority students report being actively discouraged from pursuing careers in mathematics and science. Racial and ethnic categories used for collecting data are not consistent across all organizations and some have changed over time, somewhat complicating comparisons. The terms “minority” and “person of color” are themselves controversial; for instance, in the United States, persons of Asian descent would qualify on both scores and yet are not usually classified as such. A better formulation in this case might be “members of ethnic groups with traditionally lower representation in mathematics,” but the terms “minority” and “person of color” will be retained, since those terms are commonly used and understood.

Minority Mathematicians in History

Historians and mathematicians have detailed the lives and work of many outstanding mathematically talented people of color. Such work came out of research that suggested the importance of role models, the known benefits of humanizing mathematics, and a desire to provide counterexamples to noted racist attitudes.

Minority mathematicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced many barriers, including restricted educational, employment, and publishing opportunities; derogatory comments and intimidation; and Jim Crow treatment that barred minorities from attending conferences. Despite these conditions, many mathematicians of color succeeded in making great contributions to the mathematics community. Elbert Cox was the first minority American to obtain a PhD in mathematics. He attended a segregated primary school with what has been noted as inadequate educational resources. In high school he became a talented violinist, and he also enjoyed and excelled in mathematics and physics. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in mathematics and his transcript listed “COLORED” across it. His 1925 Cornell University PhD thesis was “Polynomial Solutions of Difference Equations.” He was also recognized as an outstanding teacher and effective master’s thesis adviser during his career at Howard University, a historically Black institution.

Other early minority PhDs in mathematics include dozens of mathematicians whose contributions to mathematics and mathematics education have been broad and varied. One name that often appears on lists of prominent mathematicians of color is that of David Blackwell, a noted statistician and game theorist who earned his PhD in 1941. He stated, “[Racial discrimination] never bothered me. I’ll put it that way. It surely shaped my expectations from the very beginning. It never occurred to me to think about teaching in a major university since it wasn’t in my horizon at all.” Joaquin Diaz is noted as the first Hispanic to obtain his PhD in mathematics from an American institution. His 1945 thesis at Brown University was titled “On a Class of Partial Differential Equations of Even Order.” He worked at a number of different institutions, including as a research associate at the Institute for Fluid Dynamics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Maryland and as a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Until the twenty-first century, it was thought that Evelyn Boyd Granville, who received her PhD in 1949 from Yale University in functional analysis, and Marjorie Lee Browne, who received her PhD in 1950 from the University of Michigan in topological and matrix groups, were the first minority women PhDs in mathematics. However, earlier in the 1940s, Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes obtained her PhD from Catholic University of America by writing a thesis on the “Determination of Sets of Independent Conditions Characterizing Certain Special Cases of Symmetric Correspondences.” While she had a very distinguished teaching career in the Washington, DC, public school system, her divergence from the research community may explain why mathematicians were not aware that she was actually the first woman minority PhD in mathematics. In addition, histories and statistics on mathematicians of color were not common until later in the twentieth century, leading some early mathematicians to remain unknown.

In 1964, when Thomas Storer graduated from the University of Southern California with a thesis on “A Family of Generalized Difference Sets,” he may have been the first Indigenous person to obtain a PhD in mathematics, although some historians refer to the possibility of an earlier PhD in mathematics education. Storer’s research was primarily in combinatorics, although he was also known for his teaching, advising of honors students, and as a leading authority on string tricks and figures. Another notable minority mathematician who obtained his PhD before 1970 is Hispanic mathematician Richard Tapia, who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1967. He received many honors and awards, and his research in computational mathematics and educational outreach programs are known nationwide. He explained:

Some of my job duties include teaching mathematics and science to college students, writing books, doing research, and working with the community. When I made my career choice, I knew I wanted to reach out to underrepresented groups, especially Hispanics. I wanted to show minority students that if they really want to do something, they can. I believe I can improve minorities’ participation in science and mathematics. However, in order to do this, I have to serve as a role model by first being an excellent scientist.

Recent Developments

Despite the climbing cumulative numbers of minority mathematicians and improving conditions and opportunities for students of color during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, experts noted that the traditional stereotypes of mathematicians continued to conflict with the cultural identities of minority groups. In 1997, mathematician Scott Williams created the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora website “to suggest modern mathematicians and scientists as images of success to present to the African American community.” Other groups, such as the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science and the Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement Program of the Mathematical Association of America also worked to grow the representation of people of color in the field.

Many researchers have conducted studies exploring factors relating to the continued underrepresentation of minorities in mathematics. For example, some researchers noted that differences in mathematics achievement may begin as early as the elementary school level. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS), which followed a cohort of children from kindergarten in fall 1998 to grade 5 in spring 2004, found that in kindergarten there were already noticeable gaps in achievement by race and ethnicity. At the high school level, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 12th graders in all racial and ethnic groups showed similar improvement in mathematics achievement scores from 1990 to 2000, but that minority groups still had lower achievement. Scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), a nationally administered exam often taken by college-bound students, over the period 1990–2008 showed a similar pattern, with most racial and ethnic groups showing improvement but Asian and White students consistently having the highest scores. The numbers of Black and Hispanic students taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams, specialized subject exams offered in some high schools and which may gain students college credit, also increased in the early twenty-first century.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, mathematics teaching staff tended to be primarily White in American public schools. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics also gives credence to the argument that some of the achievement gap may be because minority students are more likely to be taught by teachers with inferior qualifications. In 2017–18, 10 percent of public high school mathematics and computer science teachers had neither a college degree nor a teaching certificate in mathematics, but in schools with at least 50 percent minority enrollment this was true of about 40 percent of people teaching mathematics.

Students of color choosing a mathematics major in college are also significantly underrepresented in the United States. For instance, in 2020–-21, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields awarded to Black students was approximately 7.5 percent, far below the 58 percent of White students receiving such degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Historically, in the United States, Asian and White students have comprised the bulk of enrollment in graduate programs in mathematics and have received a disproportionate share of advanced mathematics degrees.

Minorities are also underrepresented among workers in STEM fields, such as scientists and engineers, though the STEM workforce did see increased diversification during the early twenty-first century. In 2021, based on data from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, about one-quarter of the workforce in the US was employed in STEM-related jobs. Hispanics made up 15 percent of the total STEM workforce, while Black workers constituted 9 percent and Asian workers comprised 10 percent. American Indians/Alaska Natives made up less than 1 percent. Meanwhile, White people made up 64 percent of the STEM workforce in 2021. Salaries in science and engineering fields also differed by race. In 2020, Hispanic, Black, and American Indian/Alaska Native STEM workers all earned less than White and Asian people in the STEM workforce.

Researchers continued to study factors related to the underrepresentation of minorities in mathematics. There have been many successful programs that increased the participation of people of color in mathematics, including the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, the Tensor-SUMMA Grants, and the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program. Organizations, and conferences, such as the National Association of Mathematicians, the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, the Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, and the Mathematical Association of America through its Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement (SUMMA) program, have been dedicated to supporting and promoting minorities in the mathematical sciences.

The International Study Group on Ethnomathematics has focused on the cultural diversity in mathematics and its applications to mathematics education. The Benjamin Banneker Association has been dedicated to the mathematics education of minority children. These professional associations have sponsored mathematics talks, sessions, and awards, published newsletters, and provided opportunities for social interaction and support.

Furthermore, new legislation passed at the state level contributed to improvements in the underrepresentation of students of color in advanced mathematics courses. In 2023, the governor of Texas signed a law that mandated school districts to automatically place students who receive a score in the top 40 percent of the math portion of the state's standardized test, taken in fifth grade, in an advanced math class in sixth grade. The law resulted in a huge increase in the enrollment of Hispanic and Black students in advanced math classes across the state. In Dallas, for example, the share of Hispanic students in advanced math courses jumped from about 30 percent to 60 percent in 2023, while Black students increased from 17 percent to 43 percent enrollment in advanced math classes, helping to drastically cut down on biases that led many students of color to not be accepted in such classes.

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