Evelyn Boyd Granville (born May, 1, 1924) the first African American to get a doctoral degree in math from Yale. She was born in Washington, D.C.. Around this time period, not many Americans acknowledged African Americans, especially African American women. She became a professor at Fisk University. She also worked for IBM and for NASA on the Project Vanguard and Project Mercury space programs. She also taught at California State University in Los Angeles. She spent most of her career as an applied mathematician for the Diamond Ordinance Fuze Laboratories.