Elbert Frank Cox, who perhaps most famous for exploring and expanding the Boole summation formula based on the work of the Danish mathematician and astronomer Niels Erik, was born in Evansville, Indiana, on December 5, 1895. His father, Johnson D. Cox, was principal and teacher at the segregated Third Avenue School, and his mother was Eugenia Talbot Cox.
The Coxs lived in Baptistown, a racially diverse neighborhood in Evansville. In 1913, Elbert graduated from Clark High School and then enrolled in Indiana University in Bloomington. He was the first Black person to be initiated into the Euclidean Circle, a mathematics organization established by the faculty to discuss mathematical questions and share information. He also had the academic average required for membership in Phi Beta Kappa but was denied admission.
After leaving Indiana University with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and physics in 1917, Cox taught mathematics at the Alves Street School in Henderson, Kentucky, from 1917 to 1918. He then joined the United States Army and completed basic training at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa. Now an officer in the U.S. Army, he was immediately sent to France to join fighting forces in World War I. He remained in France until 1919.
Upon completing his military tour of duty and after being honorably discharged, Cox accepted an instructor position at Shaw University, an HBCU in Raleigh, North Carolina where he remained until 1922. While at Shaw, he also enrolled in the doctoral program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Cox earned a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics in 1925, thus being the first African American to achieve this high achievement during Jim Crow. His dissertation title was The Polynomial Solutions of the Difference Equation af (x+1) + bf(x) = φ(x), which was later published in Tôhoku Mathematical Journal, a peer-reviewed periodical in Sendai, Japan.
From 1925 to 1929, Cox taught mathematics and physics at West Virginia State College, another HBCU which is now West Virginia State University in Institute, West Virginia. During this time, he married Beulah Kaufman, and the couple had four children. In 1929, Cox joined the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C. He served as chair of the Department of Mathematics from 1957 to his retirement in 1965.
Dr. Elbert Frank Cox died in Washington, DC, on November 28, 1969. He was 73.
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Andrea Barbour, “Remembering Elbert F. Cox: African American Excellence in Mathematics,” https://blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/iubarchives/2017/02/09/efcox/; Beairshelle Edmé, “Hidden History: Remembering IU alumni who formed Kappa Alpha Psi,” https://fox59.com/news/hidden-history-remembering-the-men-who-formed-ius-kappa-alpha-psi-chapter/; Talitha M. Washington, “Evansville Honors the First Black Ph.D. in Mathematics and His Family,” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265229056_Evansville_Honors_the_First_Black_PhD_in_Mathematics_and_His_Family.
