Evelyn Boyd Granville papers

Evelyn Boyd was born May 1, 1924 in Washington, D.C., to William and Julia Walker Boyd. An excellent student, during her senior year at Paul Dunbar High School, she won a scholarship from the Phi Delta Kappa Sorority, which she used to attend Smith College. Though her initial plan had been to study French and mathematics, Boyd found that her strength was in the latter. In 1945, she graduated summa cum laude and was invited to join the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She received scholarships and fellowships to pursue graduate studies at Yale University. When she earned her Ph.D. in 1949 in pure mathematics, she became one of the first two black American women to do so. Unable to find a job in New York, Granville took a position at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She left in 1952 to work for the National Bureau of Standards in her hometown of Washington, D.C, where the Bureau was conducting research on the development of missile fuses. IBM hired her in 1956, and she worked for them in both New York and Washington, D.C. In 1960, she married the Reverend Gamaliel Mansfield Collins and moved to California, where she worked for Space Technology Laboratory and then North American Aviation. She returned to IBM for four more years, but when they asked her to relocate in 1967, she chose to stay in Los Angeles and settle her divorce. She got a job teaching at California State University, Los Angeles. In 1970, Granville met and married realtor Edward V. Granville. They retired to Texas in 1984, but soon after her retirement, she went back to work teaching math and computer literacy at the middle and high school levels. Finding that she was not suited to teaching at this level, she took a job teaching mathematics and computer science at Texas College in Tyler, 1985-88. In 1990 Granville was offered a chaired professorship at the University of Texas in Tyler. She retired from the University in 1997. In 1998 and 1999 she toured Texas and Louisiana for Dow Chemical Company visiting middle schools and talking to children about the importance of mathematics, after which she retired for the last time at 75.