Gloria C. Gilmer

Gloria C. Gilmer ( Ford; June 28, 1928 – August 25, 2021) was an American mathematician and educator, notable for being the first African American woman to publish a non-PhD thesis.

Early life and education Gilmer was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 28, 1928. She studied for her Bachelor of Science degree at Morgan State University, where she was part of the class of 1949. While there, she published two papers with her supervisor Luna Mishoe; these were the first two research papers published by an African American woman, being published in 1956, under her maiden name of Gloria C. Ford. She was also a student of Clarence Stephens while there. She subsequently gained a PhD from Marquette University,

Post-doctoral career

Much of Gilmer's work has been in ethnomathematics; she was described as a "leader in the field" by Scott W. Williams, a mathematics professor at SUNY Buffalo.

In the early 1980s, Gilmer was the first African American woman to be on the board of governors of the Mathematical Association of America. In 1985 she co-founded and the executive board of International Study Group on Ethnomathematics (ISGEm), of which she was the President from 1985 to 1996.

In 2008, Gilmer became the president of Math-Tech, a corporation that aims to take new research material and create more effective mathematics curricula, particularly with respect to women and minorities.

Death Gilmer died on August 25, 2021, at the age of 93, in the city of Milwaukee, in the state of Wisconsin.

List of published works

"On the Limit of the Coefficients of the Eigenfunction Series Associated with a Certain Non-self-adjoint Differential System," with Luna I. Mishoe. Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 7.2 (1956): 260. "On the Uniform Convergence of a Certain Eigenfunction Series," with Luna Mishoe. Pacific Journal of Mathematics 6.2 (1956): 271–78. "Effects Of Small Discussion Groups On Self-Paced Instruction In a Developmental Algebra Course" (1978). Dissertations (1962-2010) Access via Proquest Digital Dissertations. AAI7905173. "Mathematical Patterns in African American Hairstyles." Presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics (1998). "Ethnomathematics: An African American Perspective On Developing Women In Mathematics." In Changing the Faces of Mathematics: Perspectives on Gender. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2001).

Awards The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has a mid-career research fellowship, the Claytor-Gilmer Fellowship, named after Gilmer and William Schieffelin Claytor.