Turning Minorities on to Math
Friday, June 15, 2001
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When Arlie Petters was a graduate student in the 1980s studying on a Bell Laboratories fellowship for minorities, he could turn to a former Bell Labs fellowship winner and mentor for advice on a career in mathematics.
"It helped to be able to get on the phone and talk to Bill Massey," recalled Petters, who is now William and Sue Gross Associate Professor of Mathematics at Duke University and the leading author of a new book on mathematical physics, Singularity Theory and Gravitational Lensing.
Petters and his former mentor, currently at Bell Laboratories and soon to move to Princeton, will team up at Duke this week as co-organizers of this year's Conference for African-American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), an annual event that William Massey began in the early 1990s to help more minorities get through graduate school and become practicing mathematicians.
CAARMS7, to be held June 19-22, will feature three days of talks by African-American research mathematicians from around the nation. There will also be poster sessions where African-American graduate students can display their research results and also seek advice from successful professionals like Petters, a native of Belize. Participating faculty, company and government researchers, in turn, have the opportunity to assess new talent and discuss their own work.
Also on the conference agenda is a June 20 keynote address on "Producing High-Achieving African-American Students in Mathematics," by statistician Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland's Baltimore County campus.
One reason for CAARMS is that attracting African Americans and other under represented groups to the mathematical sciences hasn't been easy, Petters noted in an interview.
Tapping on his computer keys, he called up National Research Council statistics showing that of the 1,085 mathematics doctoral degrees awarded by U. S. universities during 1999, only 12 went to African Americans.
"A major hurdle as a graduate student is that you are most likely the only minority student," said Petters, who was himself the only African American in his graduate school class at MIT and Princeton and is now the only black mathematics professor at Duke.
"You feel isolated," he said. "You know graduate students have to survive by being resourceful. They have to interact with each other, working together to get through problem sets, and preparing for general exams by studying with and drilling each other.
"If you are not a part of that, it really sets you up for a high probability of not getting through your general exams. We feel an organization like this can help students integrate into a community they may feel a little timid about."
After graduation, when former students become post doctoral fellows, "we can give solid advice about making sure they have a good research program under way and get their publications out in time in preparing to become tenure-track professors," Petters continued.
"And those on tenure track can share our experiences of what that was like, not only in the implications of a serious research program but in services to the university and the search for grants. A lot of these things nobody teaches you. You sort of learn them by osmosis. And I think for minorities, the experiences of those who have been down that road help a lot."
Sponsors of this year's conference include Duke, the National Security Agency and Morgan State University, also in Baltimore. More information about the conference, including links to other background information, can be obtained online at