With financial support from her aunt and a small partial scholarship from Phi Delta Kappa, Boyd entered Smith College in the fall of 1941. She majored in mathematics and physics, but also took a keen interest in astronomy. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Sigma Xi and graduated summa cum laude in 1945. Encouraged by a graduate scholarship from the Smith Student Aid Society of Smith College, she applied to graduate programs in mathematics and was accepted by both Yale University and the University of Michigan; she chose Yale because of the financial aid they offered. There she studied functional analysis under the supervision of Einar Hille, finishing her doctorate in 1949. Her dissertation was "On Laguerre Series in the Complex Domain".[3][4][14]
Career
Following graduate school, Boyd went to New York University Institute for Mathematics and performed research and teaching there.[15] After, in 1950, she took a teaching position at Fisk University, a college for black students in Nashville, Tennessee (more prestigious postings being unavailable to black women). Two of her students there, Vivienne Malone-Mayes and Etta Zuber Falconer, went on to earn doctorates in mathematics of their own. But by 1952 she left academia and returned to Washington with a position at the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories. In January 1956, she moved to IBM as a computer programmer; when IBM received a NASA contract, she moved to Vanguard Computing Center in Washington, D.C.[16]
Boyd moved from Washington to New York City in 1957. In 1960, after marrying Reverend G. Mansfield Collins, Boyd moved to Los Angeles. There she worked for the U.S. Space Technology Laboratories, which became the North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division in 1962.[16] She worked on various projects for the Apollo program, including celestial mechanics, trajectory computation, and "digital computer techniques".[17]
Forced to move because of a restructuring at IBM,[4] she took a position at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) in 1967 as a full professor of mathematics.[16]
After retiring from CSULA in 1984 she taught at Texas College in Tyler, Texas for four years, and then in 1990 joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Tyler as the Sam A. Lindsey Professor of mathematics. There she developed elementary school math enrichment programs. Since 1967, Granville was a strong advocate for women's education in tech.[3][4]
"Lee Lorch, the chair of the mathematics department at Fisk University, and three Black colleagues, Evelyn Boyd (now Granville), Walter Brown, and H. M. Holloway came to the meeting and were able to attend the scientific sessions. However, the organizer for the closing banquet refused to honor the reservations of these four mathematicians. (Letters in Science, August 10, 1951, pp. 161–162 spell out the details). Lorch and his colleagues wrote to the governing bodies of the AMS and MAA seeking bylaws against discrimination. Bylaws were not changed, but non-discriminatory policies were established and have been strictly observed since then."[21][22][23]
Personal life
Boyd married Reverend Gamaliele Mansifeld Collins in 1961. In 1967, Boyd and Collins divorced. She married realtor Edward V. Granville in 1970.[3][4][16] The two moved to Tyler, Texas in 1983.[24] After Edward passed, she returned to Washington, D.C. in 2010 and settled into retirement, "where she regularly bristled when she heard anyone say that "women can't do math"."[25]
In 1989, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Smith College, the first one given by an American institution to an African-American woman mathematician.[4][28][29]
Granville was appointed to the Sam A. Lindsey Chair of the University of Texas at Tyler (1990-1991).[30]
In 2000, she was awarded the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association's highest honour.[33]
In 2001, she was cited in the Virginia state senate's Joint Resolution No. 377, Designating February 25 as "African-American Scientist and Inventor Day."[34]
In 2016, technology firm New Relic's Mount Codemore initiative named her as one of "four giants of women's contributions to science and technology".[36]
^ abcdefgWilliams, Scott W. "Evelyn Boyd Granville". Black Women in Mathematics. Mathematics Department, State University of New York at Buffalo. Retrieved 2014-06-21..
^Inventors and Inventions, Volume 2. Marshall Cavendish. 2008. p. 343. ISBN9780761477648. During the 1960s, perhaps the greatest achievement in computing was guiding Apollo space rockets to the moon. Some of the important Apollo programs were written by Elizabeth Boyd Granville (1924-).
^"Smith E-News 2006". Smith College. 2006. Retrieved 2017-10-29. [Granville has] long been a pioneer in applied mathematics and computer technology, having joined the staff of IBM in 1956 to work on projects for NASA.
^Beckenham, Annabel (January 2001). A Woman's Place in Cyberspace: critical analysis of discourse, purpose and practice with regard to women and new communication technologies(PDF) (MA). University of Canberra. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2017-11-07. Retrieved 2017-10-29. [The Ada Project,] originally developed at Yale University, is designed to serve as a clearing house for information and resources related to women and computing. Given its aim and its authority, it is telling that the site lists precisely twelve women as 'pioneering women of computing'. They are, in order of appearance; Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), Edith Clarke (1883-1959), Rosa Peter (1905-1977), Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), Alexandra Illmer Forsythe (1918-1980), Evelyn Boyd Granville, Margaret R. Fox, Erna Schneider Hoover, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Alice Burks, Adele Goldstine, and Joan Margaret Winters.
^Collins, Sibrina (2016-06-13). "Unsung: Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville". Undark.org. Another groundbreaker is Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville, a mathematician who worked on orbit computations and computer procedures for three space-related projects — Project Vanguard (originally managed by the Naval Research Laboratory and later transferred to NASA); Project Mercury (the nation's first effort to put a man in space); and the program that eventually put a man on the moon, Project Apollo.
^Mirjana, Ivanović; Zoran, Putnik; Anja, Šišarica; Zoran, Budimac (2010). "A Note on Performance and Satisfaction of Female Students Studying Computer Science". Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences. 9 (1): 32–41. doi:10.11120/ital.2010.09010032. Another important figure of that time was Evelyn Granville, a pioneer in information technology who began her career in academia, went on to programming challenges at IBM and ultimately worked on the NASA space programme before returning to teach others.