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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Can you name ten black scientists whose discoveries are used with some frequency? Say roughly at the level of David Blackwell or higher.

This is not a gotcha. I’m open to learning something.

I found this an interesting exercise, so here's who I was able to come up with:

  1. Norbert Rillieux, inventor of the multiple effect-evaporator used in industrial sugar production.

  2. Percy Julian, pioneer of chemical synthesis of steroids and hormonal drugs.

  3. John Hodge, who determined the mechanism of the Maillard reaction in cooking.

  4. John Dabiri, developer of advanced wind turbines and some weird jellyfish-inspired soft robots

  5. George Carruthers, inventor of the ultraviolet camera deployed on the Moon by Apollo 16

  6. Arlie Petters, developer of the mathematical theory of gravitational lensing

  7. Alexander Anim-Mensah, whose contributions to membrane engineering are quite opaque to me, but seem to be quite significant in the areas of water filtration and improvement of washing machines

  8. Mark Dean, who holds an impressive number of patents in computer hardware and processor design

  9. Charles Drew, who achievements in blood plasma storage enabled the development of the first large-scale blood banks during WWII

  10. Kristala Prather, one of the major figures in the infant field of synthetic biology

I tried to limit this list as much as I could to the harder sciences and to leave out anyone whose contributions or lack thereof are at the center of a major controversy, which narrowed it down considerably. You are free to point out that this list includes mostly highly selected African immigrants or people with so little black ancestry that no one but an American would label them as such.

Thanks! This is a much better answer.

I don't think I can satisfy the exact requirements you want. David Blackwell did his work while the foundations of his field were being developed so it gets outsized use. There isn't really something as important as statistics where the foundational work was done late enough that the generation born after say civil rights could contribute. I think it's uncontroversial that there wasn't a level playing field before?

My list is also somewhat focused on younger people since it's a bit easier for me to judge their credentials and I'm more likely to have heard of them.

With that said, here's a list of prominent black scientists and mathematicians I can name off the top of my head. I think all of them are pretty respected within their field:

This isn't quite 10, some quick further research finds:

Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum matches the level of impact you're looking for, but sort of in a right-time-right-place technicality way. Also, Robert Ellis seems to match the older-figure pioneer pattern of David Blackwell.

You can judge for yourself how compelling this list is. It works better as support for the level-of-talent argument instead of the level-of-societal-contribution one, though the second is very hard for me to judge and sort of random.

I’d discount Fryer (economics is not really a science in my book) and maybe McWhorter. For the others, I will need to spend some time on mathsci.net and arxiv to be sure. Let’s take a few days’ pause on the discussion if you don’t mind.

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