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Nitya Nigam | Sign petitions and donate to the cause through this link. In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless more at the hands of police officers, protests have gripped the USA, and the Black Lives Matter movement has regained a lot of momentum. Police brutality is one of the many forms of racism that affect people of African origin. Racial injustices aren't just limited to violence, though. Black students are given fewer educational opportunities at a young age, which means they are less likely to end up doing well in higher academic studies, if they even get to university. Even after that, high-level academia in STEM fields, especially maths, is very white and Asian dominated. Only three African-Americans have received PhDs in mathematics from Stanford University in the US, in its entire 129-year history. But receiving a doctorate or a position as a tenured professor does not stop people of African origin from being taken less seriously in academic contexts, and they are often left wondering if they are being seen as a genuine expert in their field or just “the token African-American”. In today’s article, I’d like to take a look at three black individuals who have defied the odds to make a name for themselves in STEM fields, not just to celebrate their achievements, but to honour those who may have been just as bright, but were not given the opportunities to shine.
Joy Buolamwini is a computer scientist and researcher at the MIT Media Lab, where she focuses her work on identifying bias in algorithms and developing ways to hold algorithm designers accountable. Her work has been imperative in highlighting the many ways in which machine learning (the maths behind which we discussed in this article) amplifies the discrimination against women and minorities that already exists in our society. Google has cited her research as a reason for their decision to address gender and racial bias in their algorithms. What is perhaps most relevant right now is the work she has done that reveals the flaws of predictive policing, which makes use of algorithms to determine whether a felon is likely to reoffend. These algorithms are extremely unfair towards black people, and lead to increased violence against African-Americans as well as higher incarceration rates for them. Thanks in part to her work, the Los Angeles police department shut down their predictive policing program in April this year, and steps are being taken to do the same in other police departments around the USA. William Massey is a mathematician and professor at Princeton University. He is considered to be one of the most eminent researchers in the field of queuing theory, which studies (big surprise) properties of queues, such as lengths and waiting times. Classical queuing models rely on the assumption that “calling rates” (the rate of objects joining a queue) are constant, but in the real world, this is not the case. Dr Massey’s PhD thesis created an entirely novel method to deal with this. However, Dr Massey’s contributions to society are not just limited to his mathematical research. In 1995, he founded the Council for African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), which is an annual conference that provides a forum for minority researchers to showcase their work across a wide range of mathematical fields, and encourages minority graduate students to work towards doctorate degrees. In 2006, Dr Massey won the Blackwell-Tapia Prize for his contributions to maths as well as “his mentoring of minorities in the field of mathematics”. Kate Okikiolu is a mathematician and professor at Johns Hopkins University, having previously taught and researched at Princeton, MIT and UCSD. She is well known for her work with elliptic operators, which are used in solving partial differential equations (equations that deal with the rates of change of more than one variable at once), and appear frequently in the study of electrostatics and continuum mechanics. In 1997, she won a Sloan Research Fellowship, and was the first black person to receive the fellowship since its inauguration in 1955. She is also well known for her work in making maths more accessible to inner-city school children by developing curricula specific to their learning styles, and is active in improving mathematics education in underprivileged communities to this day. We hope this article served its purpose of increasing awareness about high-achieving black individuals in STEM fields, and will encourage more people to examine the ways in which they personally can help minority groups excel academically. On a more pressing note, though, this is a link to petitions you can sign and organisations you can donate to that will help further the fight against police brutality.
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