William Schieffelin Claytor

Claytor attended public schools in Washington, DC and also the Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School in Virginia. In 1928 he received his BA from Howard University, where he had been taught by Elbert Cox, the first African-American to get a Ph.D. in mathematics. Dudley Woodard, the second African-American to get a PhD in mathematics, was just setting up the graduate program in math at Howard, and Claytor earned his MA there in 1929, with a thesis supervised by Woodard. Claytor obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933 with the dissertation Topological Immersion of Peanian Continua in a Spherical Surface, directed by John R. Kline, Kline wrote to Moore saying: "Claytor wrote a very fine thesis. In many ways I think that it is perhaps the best that I have ever had done under my direction." In 1934, a paper based on Claytor's thesis appeared in Annals of Mathematics, credited to Schieffelin Claytor. In 1937, also in the Annals, he published the paper "Peanian Continua not Imbeddable in a Spherical Surface", also credited to Schieffelin Claytor. ==Academic career==

Claytor had taught at HBCU West Virginia State College for three years following his doctorate, not being able to secure a job at a majority institution due to the prevalent racism of the era. At West Virginia his students included Katherine Johnson who later worked on the space program for NASA. he stayed there for several years, but was not allowed to attend research seminars. Oswald Veblen had finally been able to offer him a position at the IAS in 1939, independently of Princeton University, but Claytor turned it down. Claytor taught at Howard until his retirement in 1965, serving as chair himself along the way. ==Awards==

The National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) has a lecture series named after Claytor and Woodard. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has a mid-career research fellowship, the Claytor-Gilmer Fellowship, named after Claytor and Gloria Ford Gilmer. ==References==

• Peanian continua not embeddable in a spherical surface Ann. of Math. Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul. 1937), pp. 631–646 • Topological immersion of Peanian continua in a spherical surface, Ann. of Math. Second Series, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Oct. 1934), pp. 809–835 ==External links==