Dudley Weldon Woodard

Dudley Weldon Woodard (1881–1965) was an African American mathematician and professor, and the second person of African descent to earn a PhD in Mathematics, the first being Elbert Frank Cox, (PhD Cornell, 1925), Woodard's mentor.

Born in Galveston, Texas, on October 3, 1881, Woodard took an A.B. at Wilberforce University in Ohio (1903), a B.S. (1906) and an M.S. (1907) at the University of Chicago. Woodward then taught collegiate mathematics in Tuskegee for many years, until finally he earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania (1928). His doctoral thesis was entitled, On Two-Dimensional Analysis Situs with Special Reference to the Jordan Curve Theorem, and was advised by John R. Kline.

In his lifetime he published three papers, the second, The Characterization of the Closed N-Cell in Fundamenta Mathematicae, 13 (1929), is, according to Scott Williams, Professor of Mathematics at The State University of New York, Buffalo, the first paper published in an accredited mathematics journal by an African American. He also published a study for the Committee of twelve for the advancement of the interests of the Negro race on Jackson, Mississippi in 1909, a textbook, Practical Arithmetic (1911), and an article on geometry teaching at Tuskegee in 1913.

Woodard was a respected mathematician, professor and mentor to his students at Howard University in Washington DC, where he had established the graduate mathematics program. One of his best known students was William Waldron Shieffelin Claytor, who later took his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania (1933), also under Woodard's former advisor, John R. Kline.

Woodard retired in 1947, after having become chairman of the mathematics department. He died in 1965.

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