William Claytor

William Schieffelin Claytor (January 4, 1908 – July 14, 1967) was an American mathematician specializing in topology. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, where his father was a dentist. He was the third African-American to get a Ph.D. in mathematics, and the first to publish in a mathematical research journal. Education Claytor attended public schools in Washington, DC and also the Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School in Virginia. In 1928 he received his BA from Howard University, where he had been taught by Elbert Cox, the first African-American to get a Ph.D. in mathematics. Dudley Woodard, the second African-American to get a PhD in mathematics, was just setting up the graduate program in math at Howard, and Claytor earned his MA there in 1929, with a thesis supervised by Woodard. Claytor obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933 with the dissertation Topological Immersion of Peanian Continua in a Spherical Surface, directed by John R. Kline, who had also supervised Woodard's thesis and was himself a student of R. L. Moore (of the Moore method). Kline wrote to Moore saying: "Claytor wrote a very fine thesis. In many ways I think that it is perhaps the best that I have ever had done under my direction." In 1934, a paper based on Claytor's thesis appeared in Annals of Mathematics, credited to Schieffelin Claytor, making him the first African-American to publish in a mathematical research journal. In 1937, also in the Annals, he published the paper "Peanian Continua not Imbeddable in a Spherical Surface", also credited to Schieffelin Claytor. Academic career Claytor had taught at HBCU West Virginia State College for three years following his doctorate, not being able to secure a job at a majority institution due to the prevalent racism of the era. At West Virginia his students included Katherine Johnson who later worked on the space program for NASA.