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You appreciate those things in life that you earn. People cannot take those things from you.
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- In 1949, Marjorie Lee Browne became the third African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in her field (after Evelyn Boyd Granville, 1949, and Euphemia Lofton Haynes, 1943).
- Marjorie Lee Browne set up an electronic digital computer center at North Carolina College—one of the first of its kind at a minority college—in 1960.
- In 1975, Marjorie Lee Browne was recognized with the first W.W. Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education (from the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics).
- Marjorie Lee Browne was one of the first African-American women to serve as a member of the advisory council to the National Science Foundation.
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- Marjorie Lee Browne was born on September 9, 1914 in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, as the daughter of Lawrence Johnson Lee, a railway postal clerk, and Mary Taylor Lee.
- Her father encouraged her to take mathematics seriously, due to his personal liking for the subject and numbers, as he had also attended two years at college, something rare for a black man in those days.
- After her mother’s sudden death in 1916, her father married Lottie Lee, a school teacher, who looked after her upbringing.
- She completed her schooling from LeMoyne High School, a private Methodist school for African-Americans, becoming a math enthusiast and a popular tennis player.
- She, later, enrolled at Howard University, Washington D.C., by combining loans and scholarships, and completed her graduation with distinction in 1935, majoring in mathematics.
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- The North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCCTM) honored the first W.W. Rankin Memorial Award to Browne in 1974, for her contribution in the field of mathematics.
- She served as a member of various educational boards, such as Women’s Research Society, American Mathematical Society, International Congress of Mathematicians, and Mathematical Association of America.
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- She attended LeMoyne High School, a private Methodist school started after the Civil War to offer education for African Americans. She won the Memphis city women’s tennis singles championship while she was in high school.
- She attended Howard University, majoring in mathematics and graduating cum laude in 1935. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she taught high school and college for a short term, including at Gilbert Academy in New Orleans.
- She then applied to the University of Michigan graduate program in mathematics. Michigan accepted African Americans, which many US educational institutions did not at the time.
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- After graduation, she immediately took up a teaching job at a private secondary school, Gilbert Academy, New Orleans, Louisiana, exclusively for black students, which she left after a year.
- Being more inclined towards earning higher education, she enrolled at the University of Michigan which accepted African-Americans unlike other institutions which did not, and obtained her Masters degree in mathematics in 1939.
- She started teaching at the black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1942 while working on her doctorate project at the University of Michigan during summers.
- In 1947, she became a teaching fellow, thus giving full-time to her dissertation and receiving her doctorate degree in mathematics in 1949. She was among the first African-American women to make such an achievement.
- She wrote her doctorate theses on the topic ‘Studies of One Parameter Subgroups of Certain Topological and Matrix Groups’ under the supervision of renowned mathematical physicist, George Yuri Rainich.
- She was more interested into spreading the importance of modern math and encouraging minorities and women to study mathematics rather than taking up a plain teaching job at a research institution.
- In 1951, she joined the North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University), Durham, as a faculty member and soon, became the Chair of the Mathematics Department, a position she retained from 1951 to 1970.
- It was her constant desire for learning that enabled her to pursue further education through grants and scholarships. She studied combinatorial topology at Cambridge University through a Ford Foundation fellowship during 1952-53.
- She studied computing and numerical analysis at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship.
- She received grants to study differential topology at Columbia University during 1965-66.
- Besides being the department Chair, she held various esteemed positions at the college – Principal Investigator, Coordinator of the mathematics section, and Lecturer at the Summer Institute for secondary school science and mathematics teachers.
- Interestingly, there was no other staff member, except Browne, in her department to have a doctorate degree during her first 25 years.
- During her 30 year tenure at the college, she took up classes for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses, teaching for about 15 hours a week, oversaw ten Masters thesis and continued her research in mathematics.
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Born in
Memphis, Tennessee
Father
Lawrence Johnson Lee
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Quotes