ONLY 5 BLACK MATHEMATICIANS AT AMERICA 25 TOP-RANKED UNIVERSITIES

In 1992, only four blacks in the entire nation earned a Ph.D. in mathe matics. In that year, no black person in this country earned a doctora te in algebra, geometry, logic, number theory, topology, computing the ory, or operations research. Some of our highest-ranked universities s uch as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the Univ ersity of Michigan have as many as 50 professors in mathematics. Yet n one of these institutions has a black professor in its mathematics dep artment. Longstanding and tenaciously held academic beliefs in the ina bility of the Negro mind to do abstract thinking - beliefs that to som e extent survive today - appear to play a role in the almost total abs ence of African Americans from this important field of scholarship.