Edray Herber Goins
Where are you from?
South Los Angeles, California
Please describe an experience (or 2) that helped you discover/cultivate your interest in the mathematical sciences.
I’ve always had an interest in the world around me and how it works. I grew up not far from the Los Angeles International Airport, so I would hear the roar of airplanes overhead every hour or so. Often I would stop whatever it was I was doing to look up, and I would wonder “how do airplanes fly?” When I got to high school, I learned about the Bernoulli Effect and how the speed of air flow causes enough of a pressure gradient to lift airplanes. Eventually I learned one would need calculus to really understand why this effect works. I was never too keen on learning more math, but I was willing to suffer through it in order to learn more about my true passion, physics.
When I started college, I took calculus to learn more about physics. My calculus teacher, the late Tom Apostol, often told stories about how physicists used mathematics to understand more about the world around them. My favorite lecture to this day is the one where he derived Kepler’s Laws of Motion using vector calculus! But Apostol would also talk about her own research area, this field called “Number Theory”. As a freshman I wondered, “One can create a theory about numbers?!?” I went to the bookstore and found a book called “An Introduction to Number Theory”. The next week or so, Apostol informed us about a visitor who would be giving a talk, a Caltech alum named Harold Stark. It was the same author of the book I had purchased! I went to the talk, read the book cover to cover, and became hooked. I decided right then and there — my first year of college — I would do Number Theory.
What is/are your most proud accomplishment(s) regarding your career in the mathematical sciences?
I was fortunate enough to be featured in the New York Times in 2019 where I spoke about my worry about the lack of African Americans in the mathematical sciences. I spoke with the author, Amy Harmon, about what I wanted to do to increase the numbers, waxing poetic about creating a summer program which would change the culture of Number Theory. After the article appeared, many people reached out to me to say they were inspired by my story. But secretly I knew I had to do more with this newfound fame. I went out on a limb and wrote a major NSF proposal to create a summer program that has never been done before: it would bring in undergrads to do research, but it would also bring in faculty and graduate students to establish a vertically-integrated mentoring clusters. I did not think the grant proposal would be funded because I thought the idea was too radical. Imagine my joy when I found out I had been given the money! PRiME (Pomona Research in Mathematics Experience), a summer program funded with more than $500,000 of research funds, has been a dream come true. It is my proudest accomplishment for sure.
What is/are your most proud accomplishment(s) regarding your personal life?
Being able to move back to Southern California to take care of my aging parents after living in the Midwest for 14 years. I sleep easy at night knowing I can provide for them the way they provided for me when I was growing up.
Please share some words of wisdom/inspiration.
My favorite quote is by Maya Angelou: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”