�պ�����

While small, the Black mathematician community is well connected.

Rooted in the 1950s and ’60s, the family tree of Black mentors and advisors is bountiful, a remarkable genealogy connecting pioneers such as William Claytor and Evelyn Boyd Granville to Claremont Colleges academics Edray Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics at �պ�����, and Harvey Mudd College Prof. Talithia D. Williams.

Six years ago, filmmaker George Csicsery recruited Goins to advise his newest project, a documentary about Black mathematicians. As then-president of the National Association of Mathematicians, Goins connected Csicsery with luminaries in his small, well-connected community.

Csicsery’s resulting two-part documentary, takes a comprehensive look at the past, present and future of the field its myriad subjects have devoted their lives to.

“Part I: Forging Resilience” debuted in January 2024. “Part II: Creating Pathways” debuted last month.

“It brought me a lot of pride seeing George go from the abstract to the actual,” says Goins, who appears in both parts of the documentary. “There were stories that I had never heard before; stories that kept me riveted. I’ve told George several times how invaluable this documentary will be for the Black math community.”

While the Black mathematician community continues to grow, it isn’t doing so as fast or as robustly as Goins and others would like.

Roughly 1,000 doctorate degrees are awarded in mathematics every year, Goins says. But as few as 50 go to Black students. And those numbers have been relatively flat for more than a decade, he adds. At its core, Goins avows, the mathematics community is an unwelcoming one, a deterrent to all prospective math majors and graduate students.

Additionally, “A lot of Black students are really not aware of the doors that are opened if you major in mathematics,” Goins says.

Out of high school, Sonoma State University Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Omayra Ortega ’01 set her heart on studying math and music at �պ�����, and while she faced challenges in the former, she says she wasn’t the only one.

Ortega recalls feeling lonely at times being a Black woman pursuing a math degree, but never did she feel excluded from faculty or her cohort.

“It was very interesting to question the validity of my own existence in the field,” she says. “Why aren’t there more people of color in math? Why aren’t there other women in math? Those small numbers don’t change really as you get out in the field. But the longer you’re in math, the more you realize there are others like you.”

Career paths for mathematicians include work opportunities in government, with tech giants or professional sports franchises. Still, Goins says his biggest challenge is convincing students that mathematicians aren’t the eccentric recluses they’re often portrayed to be.

“There are plenty of mathematicians that don’t fit that mold,” he says.

The value of Black mathematicians

Mathematics tends to be a very insular field, Goins says, so while all mathematicians bring a level of skill to the table, common problem-solving techniques are passed down from Ph.D. advisors to faculty members to graduate and undergraduate students.

“If you look at a mathematician’s genealogy, you realize they’ve been trained in a very specific way of thinking,” Goins says. “If a mathematician is stuck on a problem, chances are the people who came before them couldn’t solve that problem either. Breakthroughs happen when someone is trying to solve a problem using completely different techniques or a different way of thinking.”

Goins says he regularly studied independently at Caltech and Stanford, learning new ways to approach math by interacting with peers doing the same. “There’s a long list of Black scholars who—out of necessity or out of culture—approach math completely different than their white counterparts,” he adds.

“If math is going to excel as a field,” he continues, “if we really are going to solve some of these interesting math problems, we’re going to have to get individuals who are approaching them in ways they’ve never been approached before.”

At Pomona, Goins runs the summer program (Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience) to diversify the field of Algebraic Geometry. He also teaches the Critical Inquiry seminar, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, where students read biographies of Black mathematicians to grasp their influence on the field.

“Journeys of Black Mathematicians” brings those biographies to life.

“Every institution that offers a math degree should show this film,” Ortega says. “It’s not just for Black students, but for professors, for staff members, to understand the experience of their Black students. Pursuing a degree in mathematics can be challenging—especially if you happen to be a person of color—but it’s possible to complete this degree and be happy and be successful.”

The Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences Colloquium will screen Part II of the “Journeys of Black Mathematicians” documentary at �պ�����’s Rose Hills Theater on February 19. A reception is scheduled for 3:30 p.m., with the showing scheduled for 4:15 p.m. A panel discussion will take place at 5:30 p.m.