J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.

J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. - Dedication from the University of Chicago, March 2007

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., ca.2003

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. (born November 27, 1923 in Chicago , † May 1, 2011 in Fountain Hills , Arizona ) was an American mathematician , nuclear physicist and university professor . He attended the University of Chicago at the age of 13 and became the youngest student. He was President of the American Nuclear Society from 1974 to 1975 and was elected the second African American to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 .

life and work

Born to Ernest Wilkens Sr. and Lucile Beatrice (Robinson) Wilkins, Wilkens was the youngest admitted student to attend the University of Chicago at age 13 . University scholarships covered his tuition and he made money tutoring other students. During his mathematics studies he took additional courses and received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1940 . With the credits he had earned as a student, he received his master's degree in mathematics in 1941 . In 1942 he received his doctorate under Magnus Hestenes at the University of Chicago with the dissertation: Multiple Integral Problems in Parametric Form in the Calculus of Variations. The country's newspapers reported on the genius. He was the eighth black American and one of the youngest Americans to earn a doctorate. A Rosenwald scholarship enabled him to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in New Jersey in 1942 . Despite his excellent references, he couldn't find a job at a research university. From 1943 to 1944 he was a math teacher at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University ), a historically black school in Tuskegee, Alabama . In 1943 he published his first two research papers on geometry, and the following year he published four more papers.

In 1944 he returned, first as an associate mathematical physicist and then as a physicist to the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project . Under Arthur Holly Compton and Enrico Fermi , the laboratory developed a method for producing fissile material for an atomic bomb. When his team was to be transferred to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (known at the time as Site "X"), Wilkins would have been prevented from working due to Jim Crow laws in the southern United States. As Edward Teller was informed he wrote on September 18, 1944 a letter to Harold Urey (who was director of war research at that time) and recommended Wilkens services to a new location in Chicago. During his time in Chicago, Wilkins then taught math and worked with Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner . Her research on the absorption of neutrons led to the Wigner-Wilkins approach for estimating the distribution of neutron energies in nuclear reactors. Their joint paper, written in 1944 and released in 1948, was finally published in Wigner's Gesammelte Werken.

Ink sketch with J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.

In 1946, Wilkins joined the American Optical Company in Buffalo , New York, as a mathematician , where he tested optical techniques for developing lenses for large telescopes. In 1947 he married Gloria Louise Stewart, with whom he had two children. In 1947 he was invited to attend the meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) at the University of Georgia . The committee informed him that they had found a black family to stay with and have his meals as he could not join the other delegates at the hotel. Wilkins did not accept the invitation and never attended an AMS meeting in the southeast. Like many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, he was fascinated by the possible peaceful uses of atomic energy and in 1950 became a senior mathematician at the Nuclear Development Corporation of America (NDA), later at the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) in White Plains , New York. In 1955 he was promoted to head of the physics and mathematics department and in 1958 first to deputy head and then to head of research and development. In 1955 he was a delegate to a conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy and the following year he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Realizing that many of his engineering colleagues at NDA were not consulting with mathematicians, he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering magna cum laude from New York University in 1957 and a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1960. In 1970 he conducted research at Howard University as a professor of applied mathematical physics. During his tenure, he was a visiting scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1976 to 1977 . From 1974 to 1975 he was President of the American Nuclear Society and in 1976 was elected the second African American to the National Academy of Engineering. In 1984 he married Maxine G. Malone and in 2003 he married Vera Wood Anderson. From 1990 he worked as a professor of applied mathematics and mathematical physics at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta and from 1995 as an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology . He retired in 2003.

During his years of research, Wilkins has published more than 100 articles on a variety of topics, including differential geometry , linear differential equations, integrals, nuclear engineering , gamma-ray shielding , and optics , and has received numerous scientific awards. In 1992 he lectured at a joint meeting of the AMS and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) in Baltimore, Maryland. The AMS banquet honored him as the longest-standing AMS member with a term of 61 years.

His famous quote is: "One day I will fly to the moon with math."

Awards (selection)

1980: US Army Outstanding Civilian Service Medal
1994: Lifetime Achievement Award, NAM
1994: Giant in Science Award, QEM Network
1996: Special Recognition Award, Department of Energy

Memberships (selection)

Kappa Alpha Psi
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
American Nuclear Society

Publications (selection)

with Robert L. Hellens, 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 EP 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.
with Herbert Goldstein, 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 Mathematics 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 JN 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 Mathematics Society, 1985.
An Asymptotic Expansion for the Expected Number of Real Zeros of a Random Polynomial, Proceedings of the American Mathematics Society, 1988.
An Integral Inequality, "Proceedings of the American Mathematics Society, 1991.
The Expected Value of the Number of Real Zeros of a Random Sum of Legendre Polynomials, Proceedings of the American Mathematics Society, 1997.
Mean Number of Real Zeros of a Random Hyperbolic Polynomial, International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, 2000.
Optimization of Extended Surfaces for Heat Transfer, video recording, American Mathematical Society, 1994.

literature

VK Newell: Black Mathematicians and their Works. Ardmore, PA: Dorrance, 1980.
Krapp, Kristine M .: Notable Black American Scientists. Detroit: Gale Research, 1999, ISBN 978-0-7876-2789-8 .
Spangenburg, Ray; Moser, Kit: African Americans in Science, Math, and Invention. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2003, ISBN 0-8160-4806-1 .
J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr., in Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present, Gale, 2001.
Kessler, James H., JS Kidd, Renee A. Kidd, and Katherine A. Morin, Distinguished African American Scientists of the 20th Century, Oryx Press, 1996, pp. 331-334.
Wilkins, Carolyn: Damn Near White: An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8262-1899-5 .

Web links

Commons : J. Ernest Wilkins - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

personal data
SURNAME	Wilkins, J. Ernest Jr.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician and nuclear physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	November 27, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH	Chicago
DATE OF DEATH	May 1, 2011
Place of death	Fountain Hills , Arizona