# Famous black mathematicians

Are there any famous black mathematicians?

By famous, I mean in the sense of having a theorem or well-known result named after them.

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Try here or start from there. There is also this, this, and you could at least have tried that. –  jca Nov 25 '13 at 14:38
Unsurprisingly there are no very-very well known black mathematicians, and for that matter almost no very well known black scientists: those people were enslaved, murdered, brutalized, humilliated, put down, seggregated, bothered...for long centuries. Let's not forget that even in the USA, until only some 50 years ago, were lots of places (good'ol south...ah!) with restaurants, buses, schools, etc. only for whites or for blacks, and even now they haven't achieved equality of conditions and opportunities. Perhaps in some centuries more...if we can live without bothering others for their skin. –  DonAntonio Nov 25 '13 at 15:03
David Blackwell is famous, and reading ths is also very interesting. –  jca Nov 25 '13 at 15:08
@000: I find your remark a little bit ignorant (in the literal, not offensive, sense of the word). While "fame" is a rather relative and slippery term, David Blackwell certainly fits the bill, in my mind. Fundamental contributions in probability, stochastic processes and statistics, with his name attached to among the most famous theorems in mathematical statistics and renewal theory. He also "dabbled" in game theory. –  cardinal Nov 25 '13 at 15:09
(The comment thread seems to have devolved into an off-topic discussion better suited for chat. As such many comments have been purged.) –  Arthur Fischer Nov 25 '13 at 20:40

## 2 Answers

David Blackwell is one of the creators of the Rao-Blackwell Theorem.

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(+1) ...and Blackwell's Theorem, one of the fundamental contributions to renewal theory which extends the elementary renewal theorem. Among (many) other contributions... –  cardinal Nov 25 '13 at 15:14

Banyaga's theorem on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a closed surface was mentioned here. Banyaga is a black mathematician. Banyaga's article proving this is very influential by mathematical standards: it is cited over 80 times at MathSciNet.

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80 times? I think you have your very own standards of what it means to be famous –  Alexander Grothendieck Nov 25 '13 at 16:42
@000, I am merely comparing Banyaga to other mathematicians as far as MathSciNet citation rates are concerned. Having an article with 80 citations is usually an indication of strong notability. Consider, for example, the fact that Shmuel Weinberger's most cited work has 51 citations. –  user72694 Nov 25 '13 at 16:45
I was just asking as all of my professors have a multiple of his citations –  Alexander Grothendieck Nov 25 '13 at 19:14