Edray Herber Goins (born June 29, 1972, Los Angeles) is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

. He specializes in

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

and

algebraic geometry Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics, classically studying zeros of multivariate polynomials. Modern algebraic geometry is based on the use of abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, for solving geometrical ...

. His interests include Selmer groups for

elliptic curve In mathematics, an elliptic curve is a smooth, projective, algebraic curve of genus one, on which there is a specified point . An elliptic curve is defined over a field and describes points in , the Cartesian product of with itself. If ...

s using class groups of number fields, Belyi maps and Dessin d'enfants.Edray Herber Goins
Mathematicians of the African Diaspora at the State University of New York at BuffaloProfessor Goins featured speaker at University of Michigan's Dr. Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium
Department of Mathematics, Purdue University

Early life

Goins was born in Los Angeles in 1972. His mother, Eddi Beatrice Brown, was a teacher. He attended public schools in South Los Angeles and got his BSc in mathematics and physics in 1994 from California Institute of Technology, where he also received two prizes for mathematics. He completed his PhD in 1999 on “Elliptic Curves and Icosahedral Galois Representations” from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, under Daniel Bump and

Karl Rubin Karl Cooper Rubin (born January 27, 1956) is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine as Thorp Professor of Mathematics. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a professor at Stanford, and before that worked at Ohio State University b ...

Career

He served for many years on the faculty of

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money ...

. He has also served as visiting scholar at both the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...

, and

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. Goins took a position at Pomona College in 2018. His summers have focused on engaging underrepresented students in research in the mathematical sciences. He currently runs the

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

-funded

Research Experience for Undergraduates Research Experiences for Undergraduates (or REUs) are competitive summer research programs in the United States for undergraduates studying science, engineering, or mathematics. The programs are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and a ...

(REU) "Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience (PRiME)", a program that Goins started in 2016 at Purdue University under the title "Purdue Research in Mathematics Experience (PRiME)". He is noted for his 2018 essay, "Three Questions: The Journey of One Black Mathematician". He was elected to the 2019 Class of Fellows of the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

. From 2015 to 2020, Goins served as president of the

National Association of Mathematicians The National Association of Mathematicians is a professional association for mathematicians in the US, especially African Americans and other minorities. It was founded in 1969.

(NAM).

Mathematicians of the African Diaspora

In 1997 Scott W. Williams of the

University at Buffalo, SUNY The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...

created the website Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD) dedicated to promoting and highlighting the contributions of members of the African diaspora to mathematics, especially contributions to current mathematical research.Mathematicians of the African Diaspora
mathad.com Williams retired in 2008 and it was left to others to continue the website he had spent 11 years building. After an initial town hall meeting about the future of the MAD Pages which took place at a Conference for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences (CAARMS), an informal group of mathematicians decided to work together to preserve Williams’ work. In 2015, the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) formed an ad hoc committee to update the MAD Pages, consisting of Edray Goins as NAM President, Committee Co-Chairs Don King (Northeastern University) and Asamoah Nkwanta (Morgan State University), and web developer John Weaver (Varsity Software).

Selected papers

* 2000
A ternary algebra with applications to binary quadratic forms
' Council for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, Vol. IV (Baltimore, MD, 2000), 7--12, Contemp. Math., 284, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2001. * 2001
Artin's conjecture and elliptic curves
' Contemp. Math., 275, 39–51, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2001. * 2001
The fractional parts of N/K
' (with M. R. Currie) Council for African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences, Vol. III (Baltimore, MD, 1997/Ann Arbor, MI, 1999), 13–31, Contemp. Math., 275, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2001. * 2003
Icosahedral Q-Curve Extensions
', Math. Res. Lett. 10 (2003), no. 2-3. * 2007
On Pythagorean quadruplets
' (with Alain Togbe) International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol 35, No 3, 2007, pp 365–374 * 2008
On the Diophantine Equation

x^2 + 2^\alpha5^\alpha13^\alpha = y^n

' (with Florian Luca & Alain Togbé) Algorithmic number theory, pp 430–442, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci., 5011, Springer, Berlin. * 2009
Palindromes in different bases: A conjecture of J. Ernest Wilkins
'. Integers 9 (2009), A55, 725–734. * 2010
Semi-magic squares and elliptic curves
'. Missouri J. Math. Sci. 22 (2010), no. 2, 102–107. * 2012
Points on hyperbolas at rational distance
' (with Kevin Mugo). Int. J. Number Theory 8 (2012), no. 4, 911–922. * 2013
Branch decomposition heuristics for linear matroids
' (with Jing Ma, Susan Margulies and Illya V.Hicks). Discrete Optim. 10 no. 2, 102–119. (2013) * 2013
Arithmetic progressions on conic sections
' (with Alejandra Alvarado). Int. J. Number Theory 9, no. 6, 1379–1393. (2013) * 2014
On the generalized climbing stairs problem
' (with Talitha M. Washington) Ars Combin. 117 (2014) * 2016
Riordan matrix representations of Euler's constant γ and Euler's number e
' (with Asamoah Nkwanta) International Journal of Combinatorics, 2016

Early life

Career

Mathematicians of the African Diaspora

Selected papers

References

External links