The Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium was established in 1999 in the Department of Mathematics in observance of Martin Luther King day. The colloquium brings a distinguished speaker to campus to present a talk that highlights their research but also addresses the issue of diversity in the sciences. It honors the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UM.
Marjorie Lee Browne received her B.S. in mathematics from Howard University (1935). She received her M.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1939, making her one of the first few African American women with a graduate mathematics degree. Ms. Browne taught at Wiley College while continuing graduate work during the summers. She received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan in 1950, making her Michigan’s first known African American woman mathematics Ph.D. recipient. Her thesis, “On the One Parameter Subgroups of Certain Topological and Matrix Groups”, was directed by Professor G. Y. Rainich.
Dr. Browne taught at North Carolina Central University from 1949 until her death in 1979. She was the only faculty member with a Ph.D. for twenty five years, and a strong leader. She chaired the department from 1951 until 1970, supervised ten Masters theses, and inspired a generation of talented students to continue in mathematics. Dr. Browne also had a deep interest in continuing education for secondary school teachers. Under her leadership, the NSF funded a summer institute for secondary school teachers of mathematics for thirteen years, for which Dr. Browne also authored four sets of lecture notes.
Source: Patricia C. Kenschaft “Black Women in Mathematics in the United States,” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 88 (1981), 592-604.
2026 Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium
Date: Monday, January 19, 2026
Room: 1324 East Hall, 530 Church Street
Time: 4:00 pm
Speaker: John Urschel
Class of 1956 Career Development Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Matrices, Moments, and Quadrature (link to video of lecture)
Abstract:
More than a hundred years ago, Chebyshev posed the following problem: "Given the length, weight, position of mass centre and moment of inertia of a material straight line with an unknown density... find the narrowest possible limits for the weight of any segment of the line." This is one of the earliest examples of a moment problem, the task of obtaining information about a measure from some sequence of its moments. In this talk, we will explore the classical moment problems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how they laid the groundwork for the modern computational techniques in numerical analysis and numerical linear algebra.
