J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.

Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr. (November 27, 1923 – May 1, 2011) was an American nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer and mathematician. A child prodigy, he attended the University of Chicago at the age of 13, becoming its youngest ever student. His graduation at a young age resulted in him being hailed as "the Negro Genius" in the national media.

Wilkins and Eugene Wigner co-developed the Wigner-Wilkins approach for estimating the distribution of neutron energies within nuclear reactors, which is the basis for how all nuclear reactors are designed. Wilkins later went on to become the President of the American Nuclear Society in 1974.

Wilkins had a widely varied career, spanning seven decades and including significant contributions to pure and applied mathematics, civil and nuclear engineering, and optics. Wilkins was one of the African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. He also conducted nuclear physics research in both academia and industry. He wrote numerous scientific papers, served in various important posts, earned several significant awards and helped recruit minority students into the sciences. During his life he was often the target of racism.

Having initially been unable to secure a research position,

When Wilkins's team was about to be transferred to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (known at the time as site "X"), due to the Jim Crow laws of the Southern United States, Wilkins would have been prevented from working there. When Edward Teller was informed about this, he wrote a letter on September 18, 1944, to Harold Urey (who was the director of war research at Columbia at the time) of Wilkins's abilities, informing him about the issue caused by local reactions to Wilkins's race, and recommending his services for a new position. As Teller explained:

Wilkins then continued to teach mathematics and conduct significant research in neutron absorption with physicist Eugene Wigner, including the development of its mathematical models.

In 1970 Wilkins went on to serve Howard University as its distinguished professor of applied mathematical physics and also to help found the university's PhD program in mathematics. During his tenure at Howard he undertook a sabbatical position as a visiting scientist at Argonne National Laboratory from 1976 to 1977. and in 1976 became the second African American to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering. J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. (right) at the Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley, California in June 1995. Next to him are, from left to right: Abdulalim Shabazz and David Blackwell. From 1990 Wilkins lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia, as a distinguished professor of applied mathematics and mathematical physics at Clark Atlanta University, and retired again for his last time in 2003.

Family

Wilkins had two children with his first wife Gloria Louise Steward (d. 1980) whom he married in June 1947,

His father, J. Ernest Wilkins Sr., served as US Assistant Secretary of Labor during the Eisenhower administration.

Wilkins is the uncle of two notable attorneys: David B. Wilkins, a professor at the Harvard Law School, and Timothy A. Wilkins, a partner with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. In 2010 a niece of Wilkins, Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Professor of Music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, wrote of Wilkins' father and her family more generally in her biography Damn Near White: An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success.

Death and legacy Wilkins died on May 1, 2011, in Fountain Hills, Arizona. named one of the top-ten films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute.

Tributes and honors

The Wilkins effect, plus the Wigner–Wilkins and Wilkins spectra, discovered during the 1940s, are named or co-named after him; National Academy of Engineering, Member, elected in 1976; American Society of Mechanical Engineers; American Nuclear Society, Board of Directors, 1967–77, President, 1974–75; National Research Council of the United States, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, Chairman, 1990–94; Oak Ridge Associated Universities, council, 1990; U.S. Army Science Board, chairman, 1970–2001. Original Forty Club of Chicago, Treasurer 1986; Secretary 1990

Selected writings and other works

As listed in this work:

Texts with Robert L. Hellens and Paul E. Zweifel, "Status of Experimental and Theoretical Information on Neutron Slowing-Down Distributions in Hydrogenous Media," in Proceedings of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, United Nations, 1956; "The Landau Constants," in Progress in Approximation Theory, Nevai, Paul and Allan Pinkus, eds., Academic Press, 1991; with E. P. Wigner, Effect of the Temperature of the Moderator on the Velocity Distribution of Neutrons With Numerical Calculations for H as a Moderator , in The Collected Works of Eugene Paul Wigner, Springer-Verlag, 1992; "Mean Number of Real Zeroes of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial. II," in Topics in Polynomials of One or Several Variables and Their Applications, World Scientific Publishing, 1993.

Periodicals with Herbert Goldstein and L. Volume Spencer, Systematic Calculations of Gamma-Ray Penetration, Physical Review, 1953; "The Silverman Necessary Condition for Multiple Integrals in the Calculus of Variations", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1974; "A Variational Problem in Hilbert Space, " Applied Mathematics and Optimization, 1975–76; with Keshav N. Srivastava, "Minimum Critical Mass Nuclear Reactors, Part I and Part II", Nuclear Science and Engineering, 1982; with J. N. Kibe, "Apodization for Maximum Central Irradiance and Specified Large Rayleigh Limit of Resolution II ", Journal of the Optical Society of America A, Optics and Image Science, 1984; "A Modulus of Continuity for a Class of Quasismooth Functions", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1985; "An Asymptotic Expansion for the Expected Number of Real Zeros of a Random Polynomial", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1988; "An Integral Inequality", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1991; with Shantay A. Souter "Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial. III", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, 1995; "The Expected Value of the Number of Real Zeros of a Random Sum of Legendre Polynomials", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1997; "Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Trigonometric Polynomial IV", Journal of Applied Mathematics and Stochastic Analysis, 1997; "Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Hyperbolic Polynomial", International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, 2000.

Other work "Optimization of Extended Surfaces for Heat Transfer", video recording, American Mathematical Society, 1994.

Biographies J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., MAA Online website, November 19, 2003, originally published in the National Association of Mathematicians NAM Newsletter, Fall Issue, 1994; J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, State University of New York at Buffalo, November 19, 2003; O'Connor, J.J. & Robertson, E. F., Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr., MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, April 2002; Agwu, Nkechi & Nkwanta, Asamoah, African Americans in Mathematics: DIMACS Workshop, June 26–28, 1996, ed. by Nathaniel Dean, NSF Science and Technology Center in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, AMS Bookstore, 1997, ; Agwu, Nkechi & Nkwanta, Asamoah, "Dr. J Ernest Wilkins Jr.: The Man and His Works: Mathematician, Physicist and Engineer", Nathaniel Dean, ed., African Americans in Mathematics, (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1997), pp. 195–205; "J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.", Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present, Gale, 2001. Kessler, James H., Kidd, J. S., Kidd, Renée A. & Morin, Katherine A., Distinguished African American Scientists of the 20th Century, Oryx Press, 1996, pp. 331–334. Tubbs, Vincent. "Adjustment of a Genius." Ebony Magazine, February 1958, pp. 60–67. Newell, V.K., editor. Black Mathematicians and Their Works, 1980.