2001 Hall of Fame Inductee Prof. William A. Massey Class of 1973 Prof

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2001 Hall of Fame Inductee Prof. William A. Massey Class of 1973 Prof. William A. Massey, a prominent mathematician in the industry, is the first African American mathematician to become a full professor at Princeton University. He holds that position in Princeton’s department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering. Dr. Massey has worked for the past 20 years as a researcher at Bell Laboratories, which is currently a division of Lucent Technologies. After receiving a Prof. William Harvard Book Award and A. Massey a National Achievement Class of 1973 Scholarship at University City High School, Dr. Massey entered Princeton University in 1973. There, he encountered his first real introduction to research mathematics in an honors calculus course. Even though he majored in mathematics, he also continued his studies in physics, thanks to his education at UCHS. His training at UCHS placed him into second-year physics his freshman year at Princeton. He graduated from Princeton in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Magna Cum Laude, Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa). That same year he was awarded a Bell Labs Cooperative Research Fellowship for minorities to attend graduate school in the department of mathematics at Stanford University. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford and was hired by the Mathematical Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories. Dr. Massey has published 50 papers in areas such as non-stationary queues, stochastic ordering, queueing networks, database theory, and wireless communications. One of his publications made him the co-author of a patent on server staffing. He has also worked as a mentor for younger African-American mathematicians. One of his proteges, Prof. Arlie Petters, is the first tenured African-American mathematics professor for Duke University..

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