Vivienne Lucille Malone-Mayes (née Malone; February 10, 1932 – June 9, 1995) was an American mathematician and professor. Malone-Mayes studied properties of functions, as well as methods of teaching mathematics. She was the fifth African-American woman to gain a PhD in mathematics in the United States, and the first African-American member of the faculty of Baylor University.
Morton Landers Curtis (November 11, 1921 – February 4, 1989) was an American mathematician, an expert on group theory and the W. L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Rice University.Born in Texas, Curtis earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 from Texas A&I University, and received his Ph.D. in 1951 from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Raymond Louis Wilder. Subsequently, he taught mathematics at Florida State University before moving to Rice. At Rice, he was the Ph.D. advisor of well-known mathematician John Morgan.Curtis is, with James J. Andrews, the namesake of the Andrews–Curtis conjecture concerning Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations. Andrews and Curtis formulated the conjecture in a 1965 paper; it remains open. Together with Gustav A. Hedlund and Roger Lyndon, he proved the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem characterizing cellular automata as being defined by continuous equivariant functions on a shift space.Curtis was the author of two books, Matrix Groups (Springer-Verlag, 1979), and Abstract Linear Algebra (Springer-Verlag, 1990).
Pierre Euclide Conner (27 June 1932, Houston, Texas – 3 February 2018, New Orleans, Louisiana) was an American mathematician, who worked on algebraic topology and differential topology (especially cobordism theory).
In 1955 Conner received his Ph.D from Princeton University under Donald Spencer with thesis The Green's and Neumann's Problems for Differential Forms on Riemannian Manifolds. He was a post-doctoral fellow from 1955 to 1957 (and again in 1961–1962) at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was in the 1960s a professor at the University of Virginia, where he collaborated with his colleague Edwin E. Floyd, and then in the 1970s a professor at Louisiana State University.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.