James A. Donaldson
American mathematician
James Ashley Donaldson (April 17, 1941 — October 18, 2019) was an American mathematician. He was a professor at Howard University, where he was instrumental in establishing a PhD program in mathematics. He also helped found the National Association of Mathematicians.
Education and career
Donaldson was born in on April 17, 1941, on a farm near Tallahassee, Florida, where he grew up attending segregated schools. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, he took the advice of his high school mathematics teacher to attend college in the northern United States, where he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. After graduating from Lincoln with a AB in mathematics in 1961, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for his graduate work, where he completed an MS degree in 1963, and a PhD in 1965. His PhD thesis on partial differential equations was titled Integral Representations of the Extended Airy Integral Type for the Modified Bessel Function, and was supervised by Ray Gartner Langebartel.
Following his PhD, Donaldson had short term appointments at Southern University, Howard University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of New Mexico. He returned to Howard University in 1971 as a professor, where he remained for most of the rest of his career.
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This entry incorporates text from “James A. Donaldson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.