Mathematician richard l baker biography

The Most Highly Cited Black Mathematicians

There are few black mathematicians holding professorships at U.S. universities. And even fewer are regularly cited by their peers in articles published in academic journals.

Longstanding beliefs in the academic world did concede that blacks were sentient creatures who were self-aware and capable of learning limited tasks. But academic orthodoxy in the United States held that Negroes were not capable of the abstract thinking and calculations that were necessary to do important work in mathematics.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of a famous document that proclaimed that "all men are created equal" at one point wrote a friend, "I have not yet found one of them [Negroes] who could solve the geometrical problems of Euclid." More than a century later L.M. Terman, the creator of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, concluded that the low-scoring racial minorities "cannot master abstractions."

Given these firm beliefs in the inherent incapacity of Richard l baker mathematician!