Katherine Adebola okikiolu (b. in 1965), is half Nigerian and half British. She is a brilliant mathematician and is currently an associate professor of Mathematics at the University of California. She becomes the first Black to win Mathematics' most prestigious young person's award, the "Sloan research Fellowship".Katherine Adebola Okikiolu was born in England in 1965. The schools she went to include Cambridge University and University of California at Los Angeles. At Cambridge University, she received her BA in Mathematics, and went to graduate school at University of California at Los Angeles where she earned her Ph.D. At UCLA, she worked with two others to solve "solve a problem concerning asymptotics of determinants of Toeplitz operators on the sphere and a conjecture of Peter Jones, characterizing subsets of rectifiable curves in Euclidean n-space and she has been exhibiting first rate mathematical abilties."
Two years later, she was a teacher and an assistant professor at Princeton University for another two years. Right after, she was a visiting assistant professor at MIT. In 1997, she became a resident of the United States. In June of the same year, Okikiolu became the first Black to get the Sloan Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award for young math researchers in the US. She's an associate professor of mathematics at University of California at San Diego.
Her family is also very math oriented. Her mother is a high school mathematics teacher and her dad George Okikiolu who is from Nigeria, is a mathematician.and inventor He has written more mathematics papers than any African mathematician. Katherine Okikiolu is married to mathematician Hans Lindblad.
Okikiolu's achievements and honors include earning a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles and doing postdoctoral work at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study and MIT. In 1997, she was awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship and was a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (500.000 dollars). In 2001, she became the first black woman to publish an article in the Annals of Mathematics, a journal of research papers in pure mathematics founded in 1884. As a research mathematician, Okikiolu has achieved success and contributed to the development of mathematical ideas in the twenty-first century.
Source:http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=438&lang=en
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/madgreatest.html
Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo[1] (born June 25, 1966), commonly referred to as Dikembe Mutombo, is a retired Congolese American professional basketball player, who last played for the Houston Rockets of the NBA. He was the oldest player in the NBA at the time of his most recent season.[2]
Birago Ishmael Diop (Ouakam, Senegal; December 11, 1906 - Dakar, Senegal; November 25, 1989) was a Senegalese poet and storyteller, active as a writer in the Négritude movement in the 1930s, as well as a veterinarian and diplomat.
Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara (December 21, 1949 – October 15, 1987) was a Burkinabé military captain, Marxist revolutionary, Pan-Africanist theorist, and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987.[1][2] Viewed as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly referred to as "Africa's Che Guevara
One of Africa's most respected figures, Julius Nyerere (1922 — 1999) was a politician of principle and intelligence. Known as Mwalimu or teacher he had a vision of education that was rich with possibility.
Share