Walter Richard Talbot (1909-1977) was the fourth

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

to earn a Ph.D. in

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

(

Geometric Group Theory Geometric group theory is an area in mathematics devoted to the study of finitely generated groups via exploring the connections between algebraic properties of such groups and topological and geometric properties of spaces on which these group ...

) from the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

and Lincoln University's youngest

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

. He was a member of

Sigma Xi Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society () is an international non-profit honor society for scientists and engineers. Sigma Xi was founded at Cornell University by a faculty member and graduate students in 1886 and is one of the oldest ...

and Pi Tau Phi. In 1969 Talbot co-founded the National Association of Mathematics (NAM) at

Morgan State University Morgan State University (Morgan State or MSU) is a Public university, public historically black colleges and universities, historically black research university in Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland. It is the largest of Maryland's historically bla ...

, the organization which, nine years later honored him at a memorial luncheon and created a scholarship in his name. In 1990 the Cox-Talbot lecture was inaugurated recognizing his accomplishments together with

Elbert Frank Cox Elbert Frank Cox (5 December 1895 – 28 November 1969) was an American mathematician. He was the first African American to receive a PhD in mathematics, which he earned at Cornell University in 1925. Early life Cox was born in Evansvill ...

– the first African-American to get a doctoral degree in mathematics. Academic positions Talbot held include: Mathematics Department Chair and Professor (Morgan State University); assistant professor, professor, department chair, dean of men, registrar, acting dean of instruction (Lincoln University). Talbot was most widely known for his introduction of computer technology to the school. Talbot's dissertation was entitled ''Fundamental Regions in S(sub 6) for the Simple Quaternary G(sub 60), Type I.''

References

1909 births 1977 deaths African-American mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians University of Pittsburgh alumni Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) alumni Morgan State University faculty Lincoln University (Pennsylvania) faculty 20th-century African-American scientists {{US-mathematician-stub