Wade Ellis (June 9, 1909November 20, 1989) was an American mathematician and educator. He taught at Fort Valley State University in Georgia and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1944. He carried out classified research on radar antennas at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and taught at Boston University and Oberlin College, where he became Full Professor in 1953. The same year, he was elected to the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America.
Ellis promoted mathematical education and was decorated for his efforts in 1966 by the government of Peru. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1967 as Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 1977, when he was named professor emeritus. Afterwards, he served in various administrative positions including vice chancellor of academic affairs at University of Maryland Eastern Shore and interim president of Marygrove College in Detroit.
Family history and life
Wade Ellis' father, Whitfield Washington, was born on September 26, 1870, in Sumter County, Alabama. In the mid-1880s, a confrontation involving Whitfield and several white men resulted in two white men dying. He escaped a possible lynching by making his way south to Mobile, Alabama and finding work as a cook on an international trade ship where he traveled to the Caribbean and the west coast of Africa. He eventually returned to the United States and moved to Oklahoma, changing his name to Whit Ellis and opening a restaurant. Wade Ellis' mother, Maggie Ellis, was born on August 25, 1880, in Dallas, Texas. Her father, James Riley, was likely born into slavery in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1844 before joining the Union Army towards the end of the American Civil War and eventually becoming a Buffalo Soldier. As a child Maggie attended an integrated school for white and Indian children and from 1898 to 1899 she attended high school at the Colored Agriculture and Normal University at Langston, Oklahoma, now known as Langston University. She met Whit in 1899 and the two were married in 1900.
Wade Ellis was born in Chandler, Oklahoma on June 9, 1909, one of ten children. As a child he worked at his family's restaurant, doing chores such as cleaning fish and shucking corn. He took up the trombone and played in a family band. Ellis excelled academically and attended Douglass School, graduating at 14. He received his bachelor's degree from Wilberforce University, Ohio in 1929, at age 18, his master's degree from the University of New Mexico in 1938, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1944. After moving to Ann Arbor in 1939, he purchased a home in 1941 with the help of a $300 ($ in 2019 value) loan from his barber.
He died of a heart attack on November 20, 1989, in San Jose, California.
Career
Ellis earned his master's degree from the University of New Mexico in 1938, though he was forced to march at the end of his graduation line because of his race. When he was invited to speak and have dinner at the Texas Section of the American Mathematical Society, black people were not allowed to dine with the Section. Worried at offending their guest, mathematicians Paul K. Rees, who invited Ellis, and C.V. Newsom, who was then-chair at New Mexico, arranged the seating so that the two of them, along with another individual from New Mexico, would leave an empty seat for Ellis at dinner in hopes that the seating would not be noticed. It passed without incident, and Ellis inadvertently became the first black mathematician to have dinner with the Texas Section.
In 1938, he presented The efficiency of approximation formulas for determining the rate of interest in amortization schedules to the Southwestern Section of the Mathematics Association of America (MAA). He began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Oklahoma, and taught at the Boys Industrial School in Boley, Oklahoma, Fort Valley State College in Georgia, and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, all of which were segregated. He received a Rosenwald Fellowship.