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January 4
Born in Norfolk, Virginia William Waldron Schiefflin Claytor earned his A.B. and M.A. from Howard University. He went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933. Claytor was a brilliant student. While at Penn, he won a Harrison Scholarship in Mathematics in his second year, and took the most prestigious award offered at Penn at that time, a Harrison Fellowship in Mathematics, in his third and final year of graduate studies. Claytor's dissertation delighted the Penn faculty, for it provided a significant advance in the theory of Peano continua — a branch of point-set topology. He was the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics. In 1937 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship and pursued post-doctoral studies at the University of Michigan where Claytor had great promise as a researcher in mathematics. However, when a position opened U. Michigan would not offer it to him; the student newspaper took up the issue with no change. Around this time, R. L. Moore was one of the dominant figures of Mathematics in the U.S. Even as late as the 1960s and 70s he was such a racist he even prohibited Blacks from attending his classes. In the 1930s and 1940s the math was filled with racist mathematicians. Moore's field of Mathematics was Topology, as was Claytor's. Dr. Claytor did make presentations at meetings of the American Mathematical Society, yet was never allowed to stay in the hotel where the meetings were held. Instead local Blacks had to find him lodging. For years afterwards, many tried to get Claytor to participate in meetings of the American Mathematics Society, but had grown bitter. During World War II, Claytor served in the Army where he taught Anti-Aircraft Artillery. It was here in 1941 that Claytor first met David Blackwell at Chanute Field, about near Urbana, Illinois. The impression Blackwell formed about Claytor's mathematical genius was immense and in 1947, the year that he became Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Howard University, Claytor was brought to Howard. Soon after Claytor, met and married Dr. Mae Pullins, a lover of Mathematics though her Ph.D. was in Psychology. Claytor remained at Howard until his retirement in 1965. Two years later William Claytor died (1967). In 1980, the National Association of Mathematicians instituted the Claytor Lecture; a lecture series in honor of W. W. Schieffelin Claytor. With 18 to 21 teaching hours per week, and, later, as Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Howard University, Dr. Claytor worked for years as a researcher publishing but two papers: Topological Immersion of Peanian Continua in a Spherical surface, Annals of Mathematics 35 (1934), 809-835. Peanian Continua Not Embeddable in a Spherical Surface, Annals of Mathematics 38 (1937), 631-636. References: Ms. Bernice Boddie [cousin to Dr. Claytor], Pioneering African American Mathematicians To become a Teacher
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